Analyzing the Impact of Wi-Fi Interference on ZigBee Networks Based on Real Time Experiments
Tulin Mangir, Lelass Sarakbi, Harvy Younan · 2011
The increase of ZigBee popularity and usage in different home area networks exert a new challenge for operating ZigBee in an environment that is already using Wi-Fi. Sharing the spectrum between these two wireless technologies affect the functionality of Zigbee as it may cause a high packet error rate and major drop in the throughput. In this paper we studied the effect of Wi-Fi interference on ZigBee channels by using the Cognitive Radio as Spectrum Analyzer [1], [1], [3] and computed the packet error rate (PER) of each of the ZigBee channels. The results that we have obtained contradict the previous analytical and simulation results in which the effect of Wi-Fi on ZigBee has been studied [4], [5], [6]. In the previous works, the authors assumed that the in-band interference signal of the Wi-Fi is a limited Adaptive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). Therefore their results were based only on the interference level on each of the ZigBee channels. While in this paper, we prove that the aforementioned assumption does not hold in all cases. Therefore the obtained results are based on the interference level and distribution on each of the ZigBee channels.