IEEE 802.15.4 Performance with Wi-Fi Interference

Abstract

This The IEEE 802.15.4 devices are proposed to operate in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. The other devices that use IEEE 802.11 b, g and n share the same frequency band. The interference caused by these technologies can degrade the performance of an IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless network. In this paper we study such degrading effects on a network equipped with IEEE 802.15.4 devices that is exposed to interference in turn with IEEE 802.11 b, g and n. The performance measure in this paper is the link Packet Receive Rate (PRR). Measurements are performed with real-life equipment, in order to quantify coexistence issues. We test all 16 channels of IEEE 802.15.4 in 2.4G band and the results show the decrease of PRR when suffering in close frequency with IEEE 802.11. The connection between energy detection and PRR is also exhibited in this paper.