Title: Exploiting temporal and spatial variation for WiFi interference avoidance in ZigBee networks

Authors: Gaotao Shi; Ruitao Xu; Yantai Shu; Jun Luo

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application, Tianjin 300072, China ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China ' School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

Abstract: Specifically, ZigBee networks share the 2.4 GHz ISM band with WiFi but have much lower transmission power. Therefore, the ZigBee networks inevitably suffer the interference from WiFi networks. In this paper, we focus on utilising the temporal and spatial feature of WiFi interference to adjust Zigbee channel over the whole networks. We experimentally examine the spatiotemporal variation of interference and then present a novel interference assessing method which jointly considers the intensity and density of WiFi interference in order to better characterise the relation between interference and link quality. Further considering the interference locality, we propose MuZi (Multi-channel ZigBee) as an interference avoiding approach for ZigBee networks. It aims to determine a better working channel for each node while taking network connectivity into consideration. Our experiments show that, under the existence of WiFi interference, MuZi can achieve 3.3 times throughput than the traditional single-channel method.

Keywords: IoT; internet of things; multi-channel ZigBee; ZigBee networks; spatio-temporal variation; interference avoidance; WiFi interference; network connectivity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2015.070396

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2015 Vol.18 No.3/4, pp.204 - 216

Received: 25 Oct 2012
Accepted: 18 Sep 2013
Published online: 05 Jul 2015 *

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