Performance of Coexisted WiFi and ZigBee Networks

We proposed a method for precisely monitoring the impact of WiFi networks on Zigbee networks. We utilized the characteristic of Zigbee that when working in lower transmit power, the interference will be reflected on the packet payload as corrupted bytes. Comparing with network analyzer, our system is easy to deploy and able to yield reasonable result. Comparing with collecting the metadata from the internal of the network, our system is not limited to specific network architecture. We conducted the experiment with our method in realistic environment when 20 WiFi access points and numerous clients are presented. Our result reveals that the duration of a consistent WiFi interference is distributed as power law. The same law applies on the interval between two WiFi consecutive interference. The experiment result reveals that the Zigbee transmission severely suffers the fast and frequent WiFi interference, which made it impossible to mitigate the interference with MAC layer approach. Moreover, the methodology of the experiment enables us to observe the interaction of WiFi and Zigbee in sub-packet level, which is more precise than typical measurement, such as packet loss rate or bit error rate.