Design of interference aware ZigBee building monitoring network

ZigBee is a new standard developed by the ZigBee Alliance for providing low cost, low power consumption wireless solutions. By integrating with dedicated sensors, ZigBee mesh network can be easily applied for large-scale building monitoring applications. However, the wide adoption of wireless products (e.g. IEEE 802.11 networks) makes the operations of ZigBee network easy to be affected as they all use 2.4 GHz ISM band. Particularly, interference existing inside a building environment includes static interference and dynamic interference, which pose challenges for ZigBee network communications. In this work, we present a set of guidance for deploying ZigBee devices to avoid static interference from Wi-Fi and propose a set of strategies to mitigate dynamic interference from Wi-Fi in a building environment. The mitigation guidance and strategies are derived from our experimental work and take various factors, including position selection, channel allocation, and dynamic interference response, into consideration.