Coexistence of 2.4 GHz sensor networks in home environment

The IEEE 802.15.4 is one of the low-layer communication standards for personal area networks (PANs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which may be interfered by other wireless devices in the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) frequency bands, especially in home environment, such as devices of IEEE 802.11b, Bluetooth, cordless telephone, and microwave oven radiation. This article examines the mutual interference effects of 2.4 GHz devices widely deployed at home, via both theoretical analysis and real-life experiment. An analytical model is proposed to estimate the packet error rate (PER) of radio frequency (RF) coexistent networks. The model is verified through a series of experiments. The experimental results also show that Bluetooth has little impact of interference on IEEE 802.15.4 sensor networks, and that the effect of microwave oven radiation on IEEE 802.15.4 sensor devices is tolerable if the device is a few meters away from the oven. Whereas, IEEE 802.11b wireless networks can cause problems to IEEE 802.15.4, however the effects can be significantly reduced by a proper channel selection. This article also proposes the interference duration model, which will be helpful in modeling of coexistence simulation. Simulation results show that the stationary scenario obeys the experiments result very well.