CoSense: Interference resilient ZigBee detection in heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

The concurrent deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee has led to the severe interference problems in the 2.4GHz ISM band. In particular, ZigBee networks are susceptible to the interferences from other wireless technologies; For example, strong Wi-Fi signals trigger false alarms to ZigBee device that is performing low power idle listening and cause appreciable energy waste. In this paper, we propose a novel ZigBee signal detection scheme, called CoSense that accurately identifies ZigBee signals in the presence of the cross-technology interferences. CoSense, which is a highly reliable signal correlation technique, enjoys the following three advantages: First, CoSense reduces false wake-ups, which typically consume energy unnecessarily. Secondly, CoSense is robust against heterogeneous interference scenarios because its signal correlation feature has been shown to work well in bad channel conditions. Third, CoSense is backward-compatible and does not require to change the traditional ZigBee networks. We have implemented CoSense on the USRP/GNURadio platform in order to prove its feasibility. The results show that, under typical setting, CoSense indeed reduces the false alarm rate and its overhead is tolerable. We can conclude that CoSense saves energy by up to 63% in heterogeneous network environments where weak ZigBee signals are overwhelmed by strong signals such as Wi-Fi.