Exploiting Diversity for Coverage Extension of Bluetooth-based Mobile Services

This paper investigates the impact of diversity reception techniques on the performance of Bluetooth (BT) packet transmission in wireless channels with fast fading and shadowing to improve the coverage extension. We firstly derive a tight parametric exponential approximation for the instantaneous bit error probability (BEP) in additive white Gaussian noise with parameters dependent on GFSK modulation format according to the BT standard. Then, from this expression, we derive the mean block error probability (BLEP) for DH packets transmission in Rayleigh fading channel by adopting different diversity reception techniques, such as selection diversity (SD) and maximal ratio combining (MRC). In particular, the joint impact of the diversity order, the combining techniques and the block length on the BLEP, is shown. For both MRC and SD schemes, we also obtain a tight and invertible bound on the BLEP, that enables us to analytically evaluate the quality of service expressed in terms of outage probability in channel affected by fading and shadowing and, as a consequence, the impact of multiple antennas on the system coverage.