Wireless communication between multiple electronic devices has been increasing as the benefits and convenience of wireless communication has become more preferred over wired communication. Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies such as Bluetooth, Zigbee™ operate in 2.4 GHz band suffer from Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) interference due to high transmission power characteristics of WLAN. Based on literature survey, ZigBee™ and WLAN device can experience interference rates of up to 58% when base lining the potential interference faced by ZigBee™. Such a high interference caused by WLAN will severely affect the network performance of Zigbee™ network. Bluetooth employs Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) to mitigate the WLAN interference. In AFH, a Bluetooth channel can be classified as good or bad, so that bad channels are avoided and replaced in the hopping sequence by pseudo-randomly selecting out of the remaining good channels. However, the AFH is not effective if the entire band is subject to interference from the WLAN device.
High power WLAN transmissions can interfere with co-located WPAN networks. To avoid WLAN interference, WPAN networks can operate in a WPAN channel that does not overlap with WLAN network. However, WLAN networks are almost ubiquitous in homes, office buildings, and outdoors in urban areas and one WLAN system occupies 22 MHz of channel bandwidth in the 2.4 GHz band. Hence, non-overlapping channel for a WPAN network cannot be guaranteed.
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