Coexistence of Full-Duplex-Based IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11

Abstract

As various wireless devices share the same frequencies in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz industrial scientific medical band, frequency sharing has become a challenging issue in the heterogeneous network. Many Wi-Fi applications increase network traffic and lead to the significant performance loss of other protocol devices including ZigBee for critical missions (e.g., medical devices) in the same band. In this paper, we propose a coexistence solution of the guide busy tone (GBT), providing reliable communications to the ZigBee network under Wi-Fi interference, and present fairness criteria in the tradeoff relation between Wi-Fi and ZigBee with GBT. The proposed GBT design, consisting of a GBT signaler and a busy tone canceller, reserves a channel for ZigBee through the full-duplex technique under heavy Wi-Fi traffic. Our experimental evaluation shows that the packet delivery ratio of the ZigBee network can be improved up to nearly 100% under the saturated Wi-Fi traffic by using GBT, which is scalable for the multinode case as well.