A New Zigbee Backoff Approach for Home Healthcare Devices

Abstract

Most of Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) used ZigBee, one of the Wireless Sensor Network technologies that offer better mobility, low power consumption and better network scalability. However, ZigBee-based devices face overlapping channel with Wi-Fi devices which cause interference when deployed under the same operating frequency. In this paper, we proposed a new ZigBee algorithm based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA-CA) to minimize the Wi-Fi interference using experimental approach. Further elaboration highlights the approach, experiment set-up and the analysis metrics for the ZigBee and Wi-Fi coexistence issues. By minimizing the effect of Wi-Fi interference, it will improve the ZigBee transmission reliability which critically required for developing a reliability HMS application. A fragmentation packet management can be considered in the future development to improve packet allocation for large type packet to avoid collision with Wi-Fi packets for better HMS application performance.