Interference Problem between ZigBee and WiFi
Wail E. Mardini, Yaser Khamayseh, Reem Jaradatand, Rana Hijjawi · 2012
There are different wireless technologies that share the same 2.4 GHz frequency band. Such technologies usually operate in proximity and have to co-exist with each other. For example, WiFi uses the same frequency band that is used by ZigBee, however, WiFi uses higher power levels compared with ZigBee. When the ZigBee and WiFi use the channel at the same time, an interference problem appears which causes loss of the data packets being transmitted. This will result in retransmission in both WiFi and ZigBee until a successful transmission is achieved. This, in turn, causes delay and mitigation in the delivery ratio for both technologies. Moreover, ZigBee would wait longer to get free medium for transmission, and with the expected packet loss and retransmission, faster draining of the sensor battery is expected.In this paper we studied the mutual impact of WiFi interference on ZigBee channels by using QualNet Simulator and computed the Packet Delivery Rate (PDR) for bothZigBee and WiFi nodes. The obtained results show that ZigBee has little impact on WiFi Packets, and WiFi affects ZigBee packets with different degrees based on the traffic intensity and number of nodes.