Frequency Hopping as Diffusion: A New Perspective on Mitigating Bluetooth Packet Collisions in Dense Deployments

This paper questions the traditional practice to use uniform random resource selection in resolving collisions in distributed scheduling on wireless protocols. Bluetooth is one such technology, and its frequency hopping feature is examined for better collision resolution performance. Bluetooth frequency hopping implementation has been used since its birth for interference avoidance. As Bluetooth devices are increasingly proliferating in our daily lives, this paper focuses on dense Bluetooth deployment environments. The proposed approach to the improvement is based on the theory of diffusion, where the original Bluetooth frequency hopping is considered to have the maximum diffusivity. By controlling the diffusivity, we show that packet collisions can be significantly decreased as compared with PDR-based adaptive frequency hopping. We believe that the diffusive approach to resource collision resolution has impacts to other wireless technologies that use uniform random distributions, such as cellular V2X communication.