ZIMO: building cross-technology MIMO to harmonize zigbee smog with WiFi flash without intervention

Recent studies show that WiFi interference has been a major problem for low power urban sensing technology ZigBee networks. Existing approaches for dealing with such interferences often modify either the ZigBee nodes or WiFi nodes. However, massive deployment of ZigBee nodes and uncooperative WiFi users call for innovative cross-technology coexistence without intervening legacy systems. In this work we investigate the WiFi and ZigBee coexistence when ZigBee is the interested signal. Mitigating short duration WiFi interference (called flash) in long duration ZigBee data (called smog) is challenging, especially when we cannot modify the WiFi APs and the massively deployed sensor nodes. To address these challenges, we propose ZIMO, a sink-based MIMO design for harmony coexistence of ZigBee and WiFi networks with the goal of protecting the ZigBee data packets. The key insight of ZIMO is to properly exploit opportunities resulted from differences between WiFi and ZigBee, and bridge the gap between interested data and cross technology signals. Also, extracting the channel coefficient of WiFi and ZigBee will enhance other coexistence technologies such as TIMO [1]. We implement a prototype for ZIMO in GNURadio-USRP N200. Our extensive evaluations under real wireless conditions show that ZIMO can improve up to 1.9× throughput for ZigBee network, with median gain of 1.5×, and 1.1× to 1.9× for WiFi network as byproduct in ZigBee signal recovery.

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