NBP: light-weight Narrow Band Protection for ZigBee and Wi-Fi coexistence

Abstract

The recent development of various wireless technologies in the 2.4GHz ISM band has led to the co-channel coexistence of heterogeneous wireless devices, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee. This sharing of the common channel results in the challenging problem of cross-technology interference, since the wireless devices generally use diverse PHY/MAC specifications. In particular, the less capable ZigBee device may often experience unpredictably low throughput due to the interference from the powerful Wi-Fi. The ZigBee protector is an attractive solution, since it can reserve the channel on behalf of the weak ZigBee devices. The protector method, however, has a few limitations; (i) it may cause significant overhead to both ZigBee and Wi-Fi, and (ii) the ZigBee control packets are still vulnerable to the Wi-Fi interference. In this paper, we propose a novel time reservation scheme called Narrow Band Protection (NBP), that uses a protector to guard the ongoing ZigBee transmission. The key contributions are threefold: First, NBP autonomously detects any ongoing ZigBee transmissions by cross-correlating the ZigBee's packets with the pre-defined Pseudo-random Noise (PN) sequences. By using this cross-correlation, it significantly reduces the control overhead. Second, due to the reliable cross-correlation, NBP is robust from the control packet collisions, which typically wastes channel time for both ZigBee and Wi-Fi. Third, NBP protects the burst of ZigBee packets by estimating the size of the burst, in turn, giving a semantic to the PN codebook. This is important because ZigBee is typically battery-powered and thus the long burst is advantageous for the low duty cycle operations. We first show the feasibility of NBP by implementing it on the real USRP/GNURadio platform. Then, we evaluate the performance of NBP through mathematical analysis and NS-2 simulations. The results show that NBP enhances the ZigBee throughput by up to 1.77x compared to the existing scheme.

Coexistence and Interference Mitigation for WPANs and WLANs From Traditional Approaches to Deep Learning: A Review

“…Similarly, Ock et al [65] extended the CBT into a periodical CBT that is effective in mitigating the interference for a multi-hop ZigBee network. Sangsoon et al [66] presented another solution named Narrow Band Protection (NBP), which is also based on the idea of the CBT. More precisely, when a ZigBee node detects a free channel and transmits a packet, a NBP ZigBee protector senses the ZigBee packet by cross correlating it with the pre-defined Pseduo-random Noise (PN) sequence and estimates the duration of the transmission.…”

Survey of cross‐technology communication for IoT heterogeneous devices

“…A coordination‐based approach is considered as an effective way to solve the problem of direct communication among heterogeneity devices, such as [3, 11, 14, 47–49]. One of the works [47] studies on how to actively ensure the coexistence of disparate wireless devices.…”

“…One of the works [47] studies on how to actively ensure the coexistence of disparate wireless devices. Other works [3, 48, 49] use indirect coordination mechanism, by taking advantage of transmitting busy‐tone or preamble, which consists of multiple energy pulses to prevent other signal interference; or by modulating the payload length to encode channel access parameters [49].…”

“…ZigBee devices with less ability often have unpredictably low throughput due to strong WiFi interference. Based on the ability of the ZigBee protector to reserve the ZigBee device's channel, a novel time‐reservation scheme, named narrow band protection (NBP), is presented by Lim et al [48]. To protect ongoing ZigBee transmissions, the NBP protector automatically perceives ongoing ZigBee packet by cross‐correlating it with the pre‐defined pseudo‐random noise (PN) sequences.…”

IACR: an interference-aware channel reservation for wireless sensor networks

“…However, the transmission request information that the ZigBee node periodically transmits to the guardian node may not be delivered due to Wi-Fi interference, and when the channel-grunt message collides, both ZigBee and Wi-Fi nodes do not perform inefficient operation. In [8], the authros proposed a Narrow Band Protection (NBP) scheme based on signal correlation that can minimize the overhead of these channel reservation schemes. However, NBP only focuses on the ZigBee detection mechanism and cannot support a low powr operation of ZigBee networks.…”