Hop counts reduction of ZigBee nodes by cooperating wireless LAN in ZigBee network

摘要

Lately, ZigBee has been attracting attention as a short-range wireless communication standard. In a ZigBee network, it is necessary to suppress the packet transfer load because ZigBee needs to operate with low power consumption and within narrow communication bandwidth. On the other hand, in typical environments in which ZigBee is utilized, such as a smart home network, it generally coexists with WLAN (Wireless LAN), which has relatively long idle periods. Thus, to reduce the communication load in ZigBee, this paper proposes a hop counts reduction method, where some packets in the ZigBee network are transferred via WLAN when the WLAN is not overloaded. Existing studies that assume an environment in which ZigBee and WLAN coexist are only concerned with interference avoidance between the two networks. On the other hand, this paper focuses on adaptive cooperation, which enables more efficient communication with low power consumption and higher channel utilization.