WiBee: Building WiFi Radio Map With ZigBee Sensor Networks

Exploiting the increasing ubiquitous deployment of sensor networks, the paper presents a system called WiBee that utilizes ZigBee sensors to build real-time WiFi radio maps. The design of WiBee is motivated by the observation that a ZigBee radio can sense WiFi frame transmissions although it cannot decode WiFi frames. A sensor passively listens on the wireless channel and estimates the RSS of a WiFi AP at its location. The design of WiBee faces three unique challenges. Multiple APs may transmit frames concurrently and frame collisions may happen. Because of severe resource constraints, a sensor cannot sample the channel at arbitrarily high frequency and hence some frame transmissions may not be sampled.