Abstract:
At present, there are large number of wireless equipments operating on the unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band of 2.4 GHz such as wireless modem, wireless sensor, and Bluetooth devices. As a result, increasing level of interference experienced by users sharing this same frequency band is an important concern. Major standards designed to make use of the 2.4 GHz ISM band are the IEEE 802.11b/g (implemented by the wireless modem or WiFi), the IEEE 802.15.1 or Blutooth, and the IEEE 802.15.4, which is mainly used to support ZigBee for the implementation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Hence, it is important to understand the nature of interference caused by the devices within the same system as well as interference from the devices implementing other standards. ZigBee devices are designed for low power, low cost, and providing low data rate. With such design aspects, ZigBee devices are prone to interference from other systems operating with higher power limitation i.e. WLAN and Bluetooth. Basic standard supporting ZigBee covers several techniques to handle interference such as the formation of mesh network, which is designed to divert the route to avoid interfered path. However, this sometime results in more resource usage. The implementation of CSMA/CA as the multiple access scheme helps in reducing the chance of collision. However, with increasing number of nodes, collision would increases as well as the contention to find available channel in order to send data frame. This results in higher power consumption, which is a limited resource in ZigBee devices.
In this work, the researchers study the interference affect to ZigBee performance via real-time test bed and design the technique for improved channel selection process of the IEEE 802.15.4 system for better interference handling. Technique focused here is the observation of spectrum usage behavior of the ISM 2.4 GHz band. The observed information is then analyzed and used as part of the formation of channel selection algorithm in order to provide more efficient selection process in response to the radio environment. The multi-channel utilization with intelligent and dynamic channel allocation mechanism is designed to provide system performance enhancement in order to cope with variation of interfered environment. Decision making process is performed by the network coordinator allowing system flexibility. System level simulator is developed and used to evaluate our method. The simulation results show the system performance comparison of the proposed algorithm and tradition system as well as scheduling multi-channel method. The flexibility of the method proposed here allows the system to have better system performance under different test scenarios.