An assessment of the IEEE 802.15.4 PHY immunity to WiFi interference

Abstract

An increasing number of IEEE 802.15.4-based protocols has emerged over the last few years targeting industrial automation applications. One motivation for this is the IEEE 802.15.4 support of low-power communications, which enables deployments with stringent autonomy requirements (e.g., Wireless Sensor Networks). However, this feature may well be responsible for a degraded performance in scenarios where the medium is shared with higher range wireless technologies. This work presents some preliminary results of an ongoing research regarding the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer immunity to the influence of standard IEEE 802.11 traffic. We find evidence that IEEE 802.15.4 communications experience a significant reliability degradation at the physical layer level in the presence of WiFi interference, even for low duty cycle WiFi transmission scenarios.