Beyond co-existence: Exploiting WiFi white space for Zigbee performance assurance

Jun Huang, Guoliang Xing, Gang Zhou, Ruogu Zhou

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

256 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increasing adoption of ZigBee technology for performance-sensitive applications such as wireless patient monitoring in hospitals. However, operating in unlicensed ISM bands, ZigBee devices often yield unpredictable throughput and packet delivery ratio due to the interference from ever increasing WiFi hotspots in 2.4 GHz band. Our empirical results show that, although WiFi traffic contains abundant white space, the existing coexistence mechanisms such as CSMA are surprisingly inadequate for exploiting it. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enables ZigBee links to achieve assured performance in the presence of heavy WiFi interference. First, based on statistical analysis of real-life network traces, we present a Pareto model to accurately characterize the white space in WiFi traffic. Second, we analytically model the performance of a ZigBee link in the presence of WiFi interference. Third, based on the white space model and our analysis, we develop a new ZigBee frame control protocol called WISE, which can achieve desired trade-offs between link throughput and delivery ratio. Our extensive experiments on a testbed of 802.11 netbooks and 802.15.4 TelosB motes show that, in the presence of heavy WiFi interference, WISE achieves 4 and 2 performance gains over B-MAC and a recent reliable transmission protocol, respectively, while only incurring 10.9% and 39.5% of their overhead. © 2010 IEEE.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP'10
Pages305-314
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP'10 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: 5 Oct 20108 Oct 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP
ISSN (Print)1092-1648

Conference

Conference18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP'10
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period5/10/108/10/10

Bibliographical note

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