Interference Mediation for Coexistence of WLAN and ZigBee Networks

In emerging ubiquitous wireless environments, mobile devices can have multiple communication modules such as WLAN and ZigBee. Since IEEE802.15.4 ZigBee devices and IEEE802.11b WLAN devices share the same 2.4GHz ISM band, a ZigBee network operating in a low power environment can be severely interfered by overlapped WLAN networks with much larger bandwidth due to higher transmission power. To overcome this inter-system interference problem and guarantee the ZigBee communications, the authors propose an interference mediation scheme in an overlaid network environment of WLAN and ZigBee devices by using an interference mediator, and evaluate the performance of ZigBee and WLAN networks for three different resource allocation schemes in terms of throughput and channel occupancy time.