Enhancing ZigBee throughput under WiFi interference using real-time adaptive coding

Peng Guo, Jiannong Cao, Kui Zhang, Xuefeng Liu

Abstract: Co-existing in the unlicensed ISM band, ZigBee transmissions can be significantly interfered by WiFi. Although several approaches recently are proposed to enable ZigBee transmission under WiFi interference, the ZigBee throughput still decreases to zero when WiFi throughput (generated by D-ITG) is over 8Mbps. In this paper, we propose a real-time (<; 5ms) adaptive transmission (RAT) scheme to efficiently adapt forward error-correction coding (FEC) on ZigBee devices in dynamic WiFi environment. We find that sizes of WiFi frames well follow the power law distribution model. With the model, corruption in ZigBee packets can be estimated to some extent, thus facilitating ZigBee device to choose a suitable FEC coding to maximize the throughput. Extensive experimental results show that, compared with existing works, RAT achieves significant performance improvement of ZigBee transmissions in WiFi environment with different traffic load. Particularly, the ZigBee throughput of RAT can be about 10kbps when the WiFi throughput is 8Mbps.