Interference Effect on IEEE 802.15.4 Performance

– IEEE 802.15.4 shares its frequency band with many existing technologies such as Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11, microwave ovens and other devices that use the same ISM bandwidth. The interference caused by these technologies can degrade the performance of an IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless network. In this paper we study such degrading effects on a network installed in an industrial environment. The performance measure in this paper is the link Packet Error Rate (PER). To measure the performance degradation we have simulated the physical layer of the IEEE 802.15.4 and used our channel measurements from different industrial sites to choose a reasonable channel model. We have simulated the IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth transmitters to generate interfering signals and measured the performance degradation of the IEEE 802.15.4. To generate the microwave oven interfering signal in our simulations, we used our measurements of the in-band instantaneous signal power using a spectrum analyzer. Index Terms— Communication channels, Communication system reliability, Interference, Wireless Telemetry