Design and configuration of avoidance technique for worst situation in zigbee communications using OPNET

Abstract

Recently, Zigbee is becoming more prominent in the Republic of Korea (ROK) as a platform technology for the Smart Grids. It refers a standard technology for the small-scale wireless Mesh Network and has the characteristics of low-cost and low-power operabilities, longer battery life, security and low-level transmission speeds. Because of its low-cost operability, a large number of nodes can be deployed at many places so that wide-range communications are possible. Also, due to its low-power consumption rates, the batteries can have a longer life by efficiently using them. However, also because of these characteristics, Zigbee is quite vulnerable to jamming and has some problems of internal interferences in a Mesh or ad-hoc network. The communication environment of Zigbee can be regarded as a ‘Non-Zero-Sum Game’ type so that the Pareto-improvement can be expected. The End-to-End communications will assume a form of IoT communications, and by increasing the number of nodes owing to its low-costs and considering the value of the individual’s convenience, it is possible that a situation similar to ‘the tragedy of commons’ could arise. Thus, in this paper, we describe our Zigbee model and discuss the avoidance strategy for the worst situation in the Zigbee communications, using the game theory. Accordingly, we have suggested 3 different methods expecting to surmount some demerits of Zigbee communication technology. The algorithms and their performance analysis will be discussed in our future extended research paper.