ZigBee-assisted WiFi transmission for multi-interface mobile devices

Abstract

It has been common for a mobile device to have WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces. As the ZigBee technology becomes more mature, it will not be surprising to see the ZigBee interface commonly embedded in mobile devices together with WiFi and other interfaces in the near future. To leverage the ZigBee interface for improving the communication performance of a mobile device, we propose a ZigBee-assisted WiFi transmission system where the ZigBee is used to coordinate the communication activities of WiFi to reduce contention and collision. A prototype of the proposed system and a detailed simulator of it have been implemented; extensive experiments and simulations have been conducted. The results show that, the proposed system can achieve significantly higher throughput and energy efficiency than the IEEE 802.11 protocol. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.