An Assessment of Ultra Wide Band As an Alternative Controller for Bluetooth to Support High Rate Applications on Battery Powered Devices

Bluetooth is a low-cost, low-power wireless technology initially designed for cable replacement. With the new mobile lifestyle based on battery powered devices, Bluetooth came short in satisfying the needs of the high-rate applications due to its’ limited data rate. Introducing BluetoothV3.0+HS specification in 2009, Bluetooth can now meet those demands by switching to an alternative controller based on IEEE802.11g radio. To this date there is no published work on the performance of IEEE802.11g as an alternative Bluetooth controller. Also, there has been no work related to the simulation of BluetoothV3.0 using the popular NS2 simulator. In this study, we present an implementation of BluetoothV3.0 in the NS2 simulator, discuss the shortcomings of IEEE802.11g as an alternative Bluetooth controller and propose a new alternative Bluetooth controller based on Time Hopping Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (TH IR-UWB) technology. The results showed that though IEEE802.11g provides high throughput than Bluetooth, it failed to do so in an energy efficient manner and is highly affected by interference. UWB succeeded to meet the goals of providing multiple high data-rate, low-power and immunity to interference, making UWB a better choice as a Bluetooth controller for high-rate applications running on battery powered devices.