Channel Selection Scheme to Improve the Performance of Zigbee Networks over WLAN Interference Environment

Abstract

ZigBee networks developed for low power and short range communication are being used as home network solution for ubiquitous computing. However, as smart phones and tablet PCs have been widely used, WLANs which use same frequency with ZigBee networks have been increasingly used. Therefore, radio frequency interference causes many problems. To solve radio frequency interference problem among ZigBee networks and WLANs, many researches focus on designing interference minimization schemes in ZigBee networks. However, existing schemes have problems that have waste of resource for detecting interference, and have unnecessary time to avoid interference. In this paper, we propose an interference minimization scheme to solve radio frequency interference in ZigBee networks. The proposed scheme detects interference using ACK mechanism to reduce waste of resource, and avoids interference using table driven channel hopping scheme which is faster than existed schemes. The performance of proposed interference minimization scheme is evaluated by using OPNET simulator. Through the simulation result, we prove that proposed scheme has faster channel hopping than existing schemes.