A Performance Study of ZigBee Network under Wi-Fi Interference

Sensor networks using ZigBee are vulnerable to interference with Wi-Fi because ZigBee and Wi-Fi use the same frequency band. Other studies have measured the performance in an environment where Wi-Fi and ZigBee coexist, and some methods have been proposed to reduce the effect of interference by changing the timing of ACK and MAC parameters. However, conventional methods are not easy to implement. In this paper, we provide a performance study of a ZigBee network under Wi-Fi interference. First, we investigate the coexistence of the WLAN (IEEE 802.11g) standard with the ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) standard. As a result, by inserting a time interval between Wi-Fi packets, the arrival rate of ZigBee was improved. In addition, the estimation of interference was possible by measuring the relationship between values of the Wi-Fi RSSI with the packet loss rate of Wi-Fi. From the results, we found that the performance of ZigBee networks is improved by the detection of interference and the insertion of a time interval between the packets of Wi-Fi communication.