Interference coordination between Wi-Fi and ZigBee networks

Wi-Fi and Zigbee share the same ISM spectrum band, thus causing severe degradation to ZigBee network performance. Since the ZigBee applications in secure, medical, or critical systems cannot afford such degradation, in this paper we develop an interference coordination scheme which uses virtual data packets to remove interference and create an interference-free tunnel for ZigBee nodes in infrastructure mode. In our scheme we create a dedicated time opportunity for ZigBee by generating CTS-to-self messages to block Wi-Fi terminals. We verified its performance through simulation and confirmed that our scheme improves the coexistence performance compared to the legacy coexistence scheme.