A Collaborative Framework for Avoiding Interference Between Zigbee and WiFi for Effective Smart Metering Applications

Abstract

Energy management is one of the foremost priorities of research in many countries across the world. The introduction of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming the existing power grid, towards a more distributed and flexible "Smart Grid" (SG). The wireless sensor networks (WSN) are considered for data communication and are generally, incorporated with actuators to implement the control actions remotely. The wireless technologies like ZigBee (for automation), WiFi (for internet) and Bluetooth (entertainment) work in the 2.4GHz band. The coexistence of different wireless technologies working in the common area is unavoidable. Hence, this phenomenon degrades the performance of each other, due to the interference phenomenon. The wireless nodes with high energy had a great influence on the performance of the nodes working with low energy. Under the influence of interference, the low-power nodes experience the uncertain sleep-wake scheduling and increased delays in channel occupation. Interference also results in, high packet error rates (PER), decreased throughput, and high energy consumption. Hence for overcoming the above problems, A collaborative framework for an effective interference management and its avoidance is proposed in this paper. The framework proposed assures the effective ZigBee communication by systematic channel scheduling operating even under the influence of Wi-Fi. The work proposed performs better even under extreme interference conditions and the results obtained shows enriched performance.Index Terms-Advanced data communications, Home area networks, Interference, Smart meter, The 2.4GHz frequency band, Wi-Fi, ZigBee.