On Modeling the Coexistence of 802.11 and 802.15.4 Networks for Performance Tuning

The explosion in the number of 802.11 and 802.15.4 deployments is exacerbating the coexistence problem, which has been reported in the literature to cause significant performance degradation in co-located networks employing the two different wireless standards. The wireless coexistence problem has, thus far, been studied primarily using hardware, due to the lack of analytical results and good wireless coexistence simulators. This paper presents the first analytical model for coexisting 802.11 and 802.15.4 networks. We derive analytically, using Markov chains, the normalized saturation throughput under coexistence. Additionally, we propose a performance tuning method that ensures QoS and a distributed Nash-equilibrium-based method that ensures fairness. We validate our model and the tuning methods using a coexistence simulator previously developed and presented by the authors. We demonstrate that our model has a low average error smaller than 10%.