Measurement of LowPAN Network Coexistence with Home Microwave Appliances in Laboratory and Home Environments

Due to a low installation cost of communication infrastructure, Low Power Wireless Area Networks (low PAN) presents an efficient solution for home and building automation. The low PANs operate in a microwave radio band that is often shared by several home appliances. Laptops, wireless routers, cordless phones and microwave ovens occupy the 2.4 GHz band without any channel allocation and thus interoperability with the low PAN systems presents a significant challenge. Therefore, we have performed several laboratory experiments to study the coexistence of low PAN devices with WiFi equipped laptop, WiFi router and microwave oven. The performance evaluation was based on a measurement of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) metric. Results shows that presence of the home appliances in the low PAN environment significantly affects the low PAN communication efficiency. Furthermore, we have deployed Zigbee based wireless network in the home environment to study the communication performance in area perturbed by common home radio interferences and obstacles. The lessons learned from network deployment are also presented within the paper.