Exploiting programmable architectures for WiFi/ZigBee inter-technology cooperation
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Exploiting programmable architectures for WiFi/ZigBee inter-technology cooperation Peter De Valck1* , Ingrid Moerman1 , Daniele Croce2† , Fabrizio Giuliano2† , Ilenia Tinnirello2 , Domenico Garlisi2 , Eli De Poorter1 and Bart Jooris1 Abstract The increasing complexity of wireless standards has shown that protocols cannot be designed once for all possible deployments, especially when unpredictable and mutating interference situations are present due to the coexistence of heterogeneous technologies. As such, flexibility and (re)programmability of wireless devices is crucial in the emerging scenarios of technology proliferation and unpredictable interference conditions. In this paper, we focus on the possibility to improve coexistence performance of WiFi and ZigBee networks by exploiting novel programmable architectures of wireless devices able to support run-time modifications of medium access operations. Differently from software-defined radio (SDR) platforms, in which every function is programmed from scratch, our programmable architectures are based on a clear decoupling between elementary commands (hard-coded into the devices) and programmable protocol logic (injected into the devices) according to which the commands execution is scheduled. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we designed and implemented a cross-technology time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme devised to provide a global synchronization signal and allocate alternating channel intervals to WiFi and ZigBee programmable nodes; second, we used the OMF control framework to define an interference detection and adaptation strategy that in principle could work in independent and autonomous networks. Experimental results prove the benefits of the envisioned solution. Keywords: MAC protocols; Protocol prototyping; Wireless network control; Cognitive networks; Dynamic MAC adaptation; Cross-technology interference; Interference avoidance
1 Introduction Recent years have witnessed an increasing adoption of heterogeneous technologies operating in unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands, thereby creating serious problems of coexistence and spectrum overcrowding. Although most wireless technologies (such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, and WiFi) have been designed to work in the presence of interference, it has been observed that performance may degrade significantly because of heterogeneous sensitivity to detect or react to the presence of other nodes and technologies. While standardization groups are continuously defining standard amendments and extensions devised to cope *Correspondence: [email protected] † Equal contributors 1 Ghent University - IBCN - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8, 9000 Ghent, Belgium Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
with novel coexistence scenarios, the wireless research and academic community has pushed forward the vision of device programmability (started long time ago with cognitive [1] and active [2] networks) to cope with unpredictable and mutat
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