A comparison between collaborative and non-collaborative coexistence mechanisms for interference mitigation in ISM bands

Wireless systems operating in the ISM frequency bands and sharing the same environment are likely to interfere with each other. We address the problem of coexistence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15 devices, and we present a mechanism that mitigates the interference between these devices when IEEE 802.15 supports voice traffic. The proposed scheme can work when 802.11 and 802.15 devices operate in non-collaborative mode, ie, independently of one another. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to the results obtained through the so-called MEHTA scheme, which is a collaborative mechanism recently presented to the IEEE 802.15 Working Group. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm gives good performance relative to the MEHTA scheme when colocated interfering devices only are considered, while it outperforms the MEHTA scheme when non-colocated interfering devices are present.