There is a range of wireless communication protocols in use by the subsystems of wireless communication devices, such as mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile intemet devices and laptop computers. Examples of such protocols include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 standard family of communication protocols, commonly referred to as WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), Bluetooth and the IEEE 802.11 standard family commonly referred to as Wi-Fi. Two or more of the communications protocols are often in use simultaneously in a single device and between multiple devices. The subsystems of the devices may require instantaneous access to the air medium and/or access to a shared resource or may pre-schedule access ahead of time. To reduce interference between the subsystems implementing the different wireless communication protocols and thus maintain data transfer rates and avoid compromising the quality of service, such as degrading voice quality in voice calls, coexistence protocols are employed.
One existing coexistence solution is priority-based packet arbitration, which provides a real-time coexistence solution between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but does not include any pre-scheduling. Another known solution is schedule-based Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), also known as Orderly TDMA (OTDMA), which utilizes pre-scheduled time reservations. Another existing solution is the mechanism of Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) employed by Bluetooth, which avoids using specific frequencies to prevent subsystems implementing Wi-Fi interfering with subsystems implementing Bluetooth.
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