CiiT International Journal of Wireless Communication, Vol 3, No 7, May 2011 546 0974-9756/CIIT–IJ-1777/07/$20/$100 © 2011 CiiT Published by the Coimbatore Institute of Information Technology Abstract---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. Keywords---Bluetooth, Energy Efficiency, IEEE802.11g, NS2 Simulation, Ultra Wide Band I. INTRODUCTION PPLICATIONS with high-bandwidth demands such as high-quality video streaming have long found difficulties while using Bluetooth due to the low transmission rate allowing only disappointingly low-quality streaming. Attempts were made as in [1] allowing compressed high-quality video streaming over BluetoothV2.0 but still wasn’t able to support high-definition video streaming. BluetoothV3.0 specification [2] was released by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) in 2009. The main addition to BluetoothV3.0 is the use of alternative controllers Manuscript received on April 16, 2011, review completed on April 28, 2011 and revised on May 02, 2011. Shady S. Khalifa is with the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt E-Mail: sh.khalifa@fci-cu.edu.eg . Hesham N. Elmahdy is with the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt E-Mail: info@h-elmahdy.ne . Imane Aly Saroit is with the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt E-Mail: i.sarwat@fci-cu.edu.eg . S.H. Ahmed is Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt E-Mail: sana.ola@gmail.com . Digital Object Identifier No: WC052011012 . beside the Basic Rate / Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) controller. An alternative controller consists of three layers: Protocol Adaptation layer (PAL) that maps the Bluetooth commands to the underlying layers and vice versa. Alternative MAC Protocol Alternative Physical Layer For discovering the peer device alternative controller capabilities and managing connections over theses alternative controllers an Alternative MAC/PHY Manager Protocol (A2MP) was added in the BluetoothV3.0 specifications. Fig. 1 illustrates the BluetoothV3.0 protocol stack. The use of multiple-controllers (radio interfaces) allowed benefitting from the diversity between different radio-technologies. BluetoothV2.1 radio is used for connecting devices, service discovery and control message exchange, while the alternative controller offers high efficiency for large transfer of data. The idea of using two radio interfaces to benefit from the diversity between them is not new; the idea was studied before in [3 4 . The utility of mobile nodes is directly impacted by their operating lifetime. Since they are battery-operated, energy becomes a critical resource where the wireless communication sub-system represents a major source of power consumption [5]. This is why the wireless communication subsystem power An Assessment of Ultra Wide Band As an Alternative Controller for Bluetooth to Support High Rate Applications on Battery Powered Devices Shady S. Khalifa, Hesham N. Elmahdy, Imane Aly Saroit and S.H. Ahmed A Fig. 1 BluetoothV3.0 protocol stack