Listen and Talk in IEEE 802.15.4 with Dual Radio

In wireless sensor networks, the license-free 2.4 GHz industrial medical and scientific band is increasingly popular. The popularity of this license-free band results in growing heterogeneous wireless networks in which the channel state detection becomes difficult. In this paper, we present a novel solution to enable Listen and Talk with an IEEE 802.15.4 dual radio transceiver sensor node, to provide a channel state detection. In contrast, to Listen before Talk or Clear Channel Assessment, our approach named Advanced Clear Channel Assessment talks and listens, which means checking the channel state during transmission. We show that Advanced Clear Channel Assessment increases the channel busy detection compared to Clear Channel Assessment by a factor of six. Furthermore, we provide a novel metric to compare detection algorithms for channel state based on threshold levels.