A Real-Life Experimental Investigation of Cross Interference between WiFi and ZigBee in Indoor Environment
Xiao Wang, Kun Yang · 2017
Communication networks are the artery of modern smart building environment where increasingly pervasive WiFi (IEEE 802.11) networks and sensor networks (e.g., enabled by ZigBee or IEEE 802.15.4) co-exist, among many other wireless networks such as 4G/5G cellular networks. This paper considers a heterogeneous network comprising of both WiFi and ZigBee (as such named as WiZi networks). Since both WiFi and ZigBee work at 2.4GHz frequency band how to avoid interference between them becomes an important problem. For this purpose, this paper presents some experimental investigation into this cross interference in real life scenarios. Since WiFi signals are usually much stronger than ZigBee signals it is normally the case that ZigBee signals suffer from interference by WiFi signals. This is intolerant especially when ZigBee signals are transmitting mission-critical messages. Therefore in this paper we are particularly interested in how ZigBee signal is negatively affected by WiFi signals. Some observations are made based on the experimental results, which in some cases are contradictory to the theoretical deductions. This paper serves to provide some real-life observations of the cross-interference between WiFi and ZigBee, with the hope that more practical algorithms to mitigate or avoid this cross-interference can be designed that are suitable to real-life indoor environment.