An area packet scheduler to mitigate coexistence issues in a WPAN/WLAN based hetergeneous network

Abstract

Energy constrained devices, operating on short-range wireless networking standards such as IEEE802.15.4 and IEEE802.11x, are expected to be deployed for the IoT (Internet of Things) applications. However, co-located deployment of such devices based on different standards using the same 2.4 GHz license free Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) spectrum, introduces coexistence issues, specifically intra-and inter cluster interference. The latter would create a much more adverse impact on these devices than the former, resulting in significant performance degradation. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel area packet scheduler that allows co-located 802.15.4 and 802.11 devices to share the transmission channel and coexist with minimal inter-cluster interference any inter cluster interference. A new OPNET simulation model was developed to evaluate the performance of this scheduler. Simulation results show that the packet scheduler can mitigate the coexistence problem while maintaining high throughput and low end-to-end delay, thereby increasing the overall network QoS.