Prediction-based Schemes for Coexistence in Personal Wireless Networks

The wide spread of sensor networks enforces the need to provide a new technology that supports the emerging characteristics of sensors. This has geared IEEE 802.15.4 standards committee toward working on the physical and data link layers in cooperation with ZigBee Alliance that has worked on the network and application layers. The new cooperation, named ZigBee, considers sensors characteristics in the full design. Numerous home applications are guiding the need for communication protocols supporting the new emergent characteristics of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), which demand ultra low rate, low power consumption and low cost. ZigBee operates in the license-free 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band that is used by many other standards such as, Bluetooth IEEE 802.15.1, and WLAN IEEE 802.13 b. This paper proposes two smart schemes that enable the communication in environments with ZigBee and WLAN devices in order to achieve higher delivery ratios while maintaining acceptable end-to-end delay values. The proposed schemes carryout essential predictions to achieve fairness among ZigBee and WLAN transmissions, therefore, attain better load balancing among devices of different networks. Simulation results show that the proposed smart and opportunistic schemes increase the packet delivery ratio of ZigBee devices for different scenarios. In addition, the proposed schemes enhance the performance of WLAN devices by increasing the packet delivery ratio, while maintaining an acceptable level of end to end delay values.