Enhancing the CSMA/CA of IEEE 802.15.4 for better coexistence with IEEE 802.11

Wireless technologies are very often used simultaneously for different applications in the same deployment area. This is more and more the case with the massive use of the Internet of Things. Very few of these technologies are designed to coexist efficiently. We concentrate in this paper on two technologies: IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11. We consider the case where these two technologies are available on the same communicating node. We propose backoff algorithms for IEEE 802.15.4 (WPAN) that take into account information collected at a multi-interface node to improve coexistence with IEEE 802.11 (WLAN). The proposed mechanisms benefit from a virtual Clear Channel Assessment given by the WLAN interface to improve both network throughput and overall energy efficiency. Our simulation results show that the proposed mechanisms improve the basic CSMA/CA mechanism of WPAN by up to 26% of more packet delivery rate under a traffic load in WLAN that does not exceed 40%.