Design and Implementation of an IoT Gateway for Zigbee and WiFi

Abstract

This paper proposed a framework called IAPA (Integrated Access Point Architecture) that applied an off-the-shelf AP (Access Point) device on WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) as an IoT (Internet-of-Things) gateway to integrate Zigbee and Wifi. This Wifi-Zigbee AP (called WiZAP) has the advantages of low cost, small size and low power consumption. However, the coexistence of Wifi and Zigbee in unlicensed bands will introduce a serious data collision problem. In this paper, we propose a linear-time balance-first configuration strategy to adjust Wifi parameters to reduce data collision. A strategy to dynamically configure these parameters for MAC layer communication is also proposed. Experiments test the influence of network transmission in real application scenarios. Results show that our WiZAP can work efficiently with the coexistence of Wifi and Zigbee.