Issues and mitigation of interference, attenuation and direction of arrival in IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee to wireless sensors and networks based smart building

The performance metrics of IEEE 802.15.4 standard make it an only dominant option in short-range environmental monitoring and control applications. The heterogeneous sensor and actuator nodes based on the wireless technology are deployed into the smart building environment. Wireless technology deployed in building environment suffers from interference from different communication protocols operating in the same unlicensed ISM band, apart from the attenuation loss. A designer could not ignore these factors in the smart building because the adverse effect of these issues on system performance is considerable. Most of the researchers reported this but not with the aspects of the smart building. This research paper reports on the detailed experimental analysis and mitigation for different types of interference, the direction of arrival and attenuation losses associated with smart building condition. This research also tries to find the mitigation by direction of arrival of the radio signal. Our research aims to generate the customized methodology that will support and assist the smart building system designer to evaluate and measure the on-site performance so that these assessments will be precise, efficient and accurate. A realistic, smart home solution is applied to the building. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.