A quantitative study of Wi-Fi interference on PRP-ZigBee

This paper investigates the use of the Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) in the context of ZigBee nodes communicating in an industrial environment subjected to interference from another wireless system, namely Wi-Fi. A hardware experiment is conducted and it shows that PRP generally improves studied system performance criteria (latency, jitter, maximum end-to-end delay and percentage packets received). Under heavy interference, with severe packet drops on the channel under interference, PRP demonstrates increased reliability in terms of percentage of packets received. Interference was studied in a controlled environment and quantified in terms of an FTP file transfer under several Wi-Fi data rates. The experimental hardware results were also validated via OPNET simulations.