Interference-Aware Wireless Networks for Home Monitoring and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

In this paper, a home Internet-of-Things system is analyzed by dividing it into four layers, i.e., the node layer, gateway layer, service layer, and open layer. The gateway layer, which supports a variety of wireless technologies and is the core of home wireless networks access unit, together with the node layer constitutes the home wireless network. A gateway prototype following the proposed architecture has been implemented. A testbed of an interference-aware wireless network which includes the gateway prototype has also been created for testing its user interaction performances. The experimental results show that both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have an impact on the ZigBee communication. Considering the complex scene of home and building, ZigBee multihop communications are set to reduce the packet loss probability. In addition, an event-level-based transmission control strategy is proposed, in which the packet loss probability of wireless network is reduced by controlling the transmission priority of different levels of monitoring events, and optimizing the ZigBee wireless network channel occupancy. Note to Practitioners —The IoT in home and building automation has become a hot topic, and embedded intelligent home gateway is an important part of intelligent home system which mainly responsible for data exchange and protocol conversion between the node layer and the user client tier. In a wireless home network, intelligent home gateway mainly supports the wireless interfaces of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee, and all of these wireless technologies work at the frequency band of 2.4 GHz, and among them, ZigBee technology is generally in the continuous working state. Hence, the adverse impact of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on ZigBee wireless network is purpose for evaluation, which relating to the popularization of home wireless networks. This paper proposes a multi-interface gateway design method, the ZigBee networking process, an interaction principle for interference verification, and an ELT-based interactive control mechanism, respectively. A testbed of an interference-aware wireless network which includes the gateway prototype has also been created for performance evaluation. Node-to-node spacing, packet loss error and energy consumption performance tests have been done to realize the optimization of deployment and distribution of the home networking nodes. The results of this thesis lay a good foundation for further study and promotion of smart home network system.