A Detection Method of Interference from WiFi Network in IEEE 802.15.4 Network

IEEE 802.15.4 network and WiFi network are installed to overlap each other and configured to use adjacent frequency bands in which case the communication service required by applications can not be guaranteed because of randomly increased frame transmission delay and frequent frame transmission failures at nodes in IEEE 802.15.4 network. In this paper, transmission delay model at IEEE 802.15.4 nodes and an experimental system to evaluate the interference from WiFi traffic are described, then elements for the evaluation of interference are measured with the analysis of their characteristics. A sequential method of using medium access layer and physical layer elements of IEEE 802.15.4 protocols is proposed to decide interference from WiFi network. With the proposed method, if an evaluation function having frame transmission failures and transmission delay as variables returns a value greater than a threshold, intensive measurements of wireless channel power are carried out subsequently and the final decision of interference is made by the calculated average channel power. Experimental results of the method show that the decision time is reduced with increased frequency of decision in comparison to an other similar method.