Spectrum MRI: Towards Diagnosis of Multi-Radio
Interference in the Unlicensed Band
Akash Baid, Suhas Mathur, Ivan Seskar,
Dipankar Raychaudhuri
Sanjoy Paul, Amitabha Das
Infosys Technologies Ltd.
{sanjoy paul, amitabha das}@infosys.com
WINLAB, Rutgers University
{baid, suhas, seskar, ray}@winlab.rutgers.edu
Abstract—The increasing density and data rate of unlicensed
band wireless devices in small office and home (SOHO) environments has led to significant inter- and intra-radio interference
problems. Multiple competing standards such as the IEEE
802.11b/g, Bluetooth and ZigBee, all of which operate in the
2.4 GHz ISM band, can interfere with each other when used
in typical indoor environments, potentially causing significant
performance degradation. This paper presents detailed experimental results (using the ORBIT radio grid testbed) to quantify
the effects of such interference in representative SOHO scenarios.
In particular, different topologies, traffic loads and number of
interfering devices are emulated to show the impact of multiradio interference and to characterize each kind of interference. Further, a cross-layer, multi-radio interference diagnosis
framework (called “spectrum MRI”) is described with the aim
of isolating and classifying multi-radio interference problems
using heuristic and model-based methods. A specific example of
identifying interference problems which may affect an 802.11g
video link is given to illustrate the proposed measurement and
diagnosis framework.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The evolution of wireless protocols and access technologies
for the unlicensed bands has led to the rapid proliferation of
consumer grade wireless devices that do not require spectrum
configuration by end users. The typical digital home environment is increasingly moving towards dense deployment of
multiple wireless devices using a variety of unlicensed band
radio standards. Unfortunately, this has also meant that the
unlicensed band is becoming interference limited, and in many
cases, overcrowded with multiple radio access technologies
competing for common spectrum. For example, the popular
802.11 standard, the Bluetooth standard and the ZigBee standard, all share the same chunk of radio spectrum, as shown
in Figure 1, in addition to emitters such as cordless phones
and leaking microwave ovens, also in the same band. As we
show in the subsequent sections, uncoordinated sharing of
unlicensed spectrum leads to significant interference related
performance degradations. In particular, we study the multiradio interference problem in detail in this paper, focusing on
the performance loss under various scenarios typical in home
environments, and we put forward the thesis that in many cases
it is possible to diagnose multi-radio interference problems by
The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from
Infosys Technologies Ltd.
802.11b/g
2412
22 MHz
2437
2462
Bluetooth
2402
2480
ZigBee
2405
2400Mhz
Fig. 1.
2440
2480
2485Mhz
802.11, Bluetooth and ZigBee Channels in the 2.4 GHz ISM Band
passive observation of symptoms that are produced as artifacts
of the interference.
While there are both commercial products and recent studies
around the interference problem in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum
(see [1] for a detailed survey), most of the work has been
focussed on troubleshooting WiFi problems in large campus
or enterprise environments. In comparison, our work differs
on two counts - (a) We focus on small office and home
environments which leads to different interference problems
and different solution requirements compared to a large scale
system, and (b) Rather than concentrating only on WiFi
problems, our aim is to diagnose multi-radio interference since
in a home environment, a user-owned Bluetooth or ZigBee
device might be equally or even more important than a WiFi
device. To this end, our system utilizes one or more monitors
that capture the ongoing multi-radio transmissions passively
and aggregate their observations into a database. From these
combined traces, we can use a heuristic or learning algorithm which identifies interference problems and if possible,
recommends configuration changes in one or more devices.
Such a low cost monitoring and diagnosis system for multiradio interference is intended to improve the performance of
home networks, which are usually operated by non-expert
users. In this paper, we first provide some qualitative and
quantitative multi-radio interference examples typical in the
SOHO environment and subsequently describe our framework
and methodology for interference diagnosis and classification
in a multi-radio environment.
II. BACKGROUND
AND
R ELATED W ORK
As radio standards in the unlicensed bands have evolved
over the years, a number of studies on inter-radio interference
have been conducted typically following an approach that
seeks to characterize one standard versus another. For example
[2] and [3] analyze the impact of Bluetooth on 802.11b/g
and suggest some techniques to improve co-existence between
these two standards. Similarly, [4] provides a detailed analytical model for interactions between ZigBee and 802.11
and between ZigBee and Bluetooth. In a complex multiradio environment having simultaneous interactions of several
competing wireless standards, the approach of modeling and
analysis becomes much harder.
A related area of research focuses on the more fundamental
causes and effects of interference on PHY and MAC layer performances with the aim of designing techniques to overcome
the problems involved (for example [5]). The authors in [6]
go a step further to derive closed-form throughput expressions
by creating an analytical framework for interactions between
heterogeneous radios using such physical layer models. In
contrast to previous studies on the nature and modeling of
heterogeneous radio interference, our work focuses on the
diagnosis aspect.
Due to the popularity of the 802.11 WLAN standard, most
work in the network diagnosis and management domain has
focussed on solving issues within this standard. The authors
in [7] for example, provide details on an elaborate crosslayer trace collection and analysis system to address issues
ranging from configuration problems to interference related
problems. Similarly, a systematic approach in [8] focuses on
the framework for collecting and analyzing traces for 802.11
networks. Some other approaches for 802.11 WLAN diagnosis
include a structural and behavioral model based system [9],
distributed physical layer anomaly detection [10] and fault
diagnosis using signal error rate and RSSI parameters [11].
In this work, we take a more generic view of the network
in terms of multiple standards and devices, and introduce an
appropriate framework for multi-radio interference diagnosis.
III. M ULTI - RADIO I NTERFERENCE E XAMPLES
In this section, we present examples of some typical
multi-radio interference problems in home networks. We
classify the interference measurement experiments into the
following categories:
•
•
•
Intra 802.11 Interference
Inter-radio Interference
– 802.11-Bluetooth Interference
– 802.11-ZigBee Interference
– Bluetooth-ZigBee Interference
Complex Multi-radio Interference
Emulation Methodology: All the experimental evaluations
described in this section were conducted on the ORBIT
testbed [12] which consists of 400 small form-factor PCs
Link 1
~ 6 meters
~ 6 meters
Link 2
802.11b - 802.11b
Link 2
802.11g - 802.11b
802.11b Node
Fig. 2.
11g-11b
11g-11g
~ 6 meters
Link 2
802.11g - 802.11g
802.11g Node
Topology showing the effect of a co-channel slow link
Configuration
11b-11b
Link 1
Link 1
Link
L1
L2
L1
L2
L1
L2
1 Mbps
1.19
0.63
17.60
0.36
9.67
0.62
5.5 Mbps
2.89
1.92
22.32
0.78
14.70
2.42
11 Mbps
3.76
2.87
25.10
1.74
17.91
4.66
0 Mbps
5.70
31.80
31.80
-
TABLE I
T HROUGHPUT (M BPS ) OF L INK 1 & L INK 2 UNDER DIFFERENT RATE
OPTIONS FOR L INK 2. L INK 1 RATE IS SET TO MAXIMUM .
placed in a 20 x 20 regular grid with an inter-node separation
of about 3ft, spanning a total area of 3600 sq. ft. Each of
these nodes is equipped with two IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless
interfaces, with 40 nodes also equipped with Bluetooth dongles
and 30 nodes also equipped with 802.15.4 TelosB motes. The
Iperf tool is used for throughput measurement of TCP and
UDP data in both 802.11 and Bluetooth radios and a customized ZigBee traffic generator built on the TinyOS platform
is used for performance measurement on the ZigBee nodes.
The throughput measurements in each of the experiments
described in this section were averaged over ten or more
readings spread in time and location inside the ORBIT grid to
remove random effects of environmental changes and device
specific variance. Unless otherwise mentioned, all the 802.11
nodes in our experiments were operated on Channel 1 which
did not have any external interference as confirmed by a
spectrum analyzer. In the following subsections, we identify
and quantitatively analyze some commonly occurring multiradio interference problems:
A. Slow Co-channel link in 802.11
When two 802.11 b/g links co-exist on the same channel,
the slower link has a higher channel occupancy time causing
the high rate link to undergo more backoffs and thus suffer a
large drop in throughput. To quantify this effect, three cases of
single link interference are emulated as shown in Figure 2. In
all the three cases, the data-rate of Link 1 is set to the highest
(11 Mbps for 802.11b and 54 Mbps for 802.11g) while the
rate of Link 2 is changed in steps. All links in this experiment
carry saturation TCP traffic with a buffer size of 8 KBytes
and each reading is averaged over ten trials of 100 second
duration. From Table I, we observe a substantial drop in Link
1 throughput when the interfering link (Link 2) data-rate drops
down from 11 Mbps to 1 Mbps in all the three cases. This
drop is about 32% in case of 802.11b-802.11b interference
and 53% in case of 802.11g-802.11g interference.
From a practical point of view, this scenario is very common
1 meter
16
802.11b with BT
802.11b standalone
802.11g with BT
802.11g standalone
Throughput (Mbps)
14
12
BT1
2 meters
BT1
802.11b Client
Bluetooth Node
802.11b AP
BT2
10
11b
8
6
11b
Fig. 4.
11b
Topology for autorate effect
4
2
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
Distance between 802.11 devices (meters)
Fig. 3. Throughput(Mbps) of 802.11 link at varying distances with co-located
Bluetooth transmitter
and can present itself in a number of ways: for example, if an
old laptop with a slow 1 Mbps 802.11b radio link is connected
to the AP, or if some sort of local interference triggers an
automatic rate reduction scheme on one of the links.
B. 802.11-Bluetooth Interference
One of the most common types of inter-radio interference
occurs between 802.11b/g and Bluetooth radios. The most
severe 802.11-Bluetooth interference is observed in the colocated case where the Bluetooth and 802.11b/g radios are
located on the same physical device such as smart phones
and laptops. At such distances, a transmission on any of
the roughly 22x1 MHz Bluetooth channels that overlap with
a 802.11 channel will cause a packet error for the 802.11
transmission. The following two experiments exemplify some
of the problems in the 802.11-Bluetooth interaction scenario:
1) Co-located 802.11b/g and Bluetooth: Dual radio
nodes were used to emulate a co-located case in which the
distance between the 802.11b/g and Bluetooth radios is about
25cm and the transmit power is 18dBm and 4dBm(Class
2 device) respectively. To create a worst-case interference
scenario in this topology, the Bluetooth transmitter and
the co-located 802.11b/g receiver operate concurrently. The
802.11 transmitter is located at varying distance which varies
the received power levels at the receiver. TCP traffic is pushed
through the 802.11b/g link with the rate set at 11 Mbps for
802.11b and 24 Mbps for 802.11g. The Bluetooth interferer
carries a 512 kbps UDP load with a datagram size of 1 KB.
From the observed throughput numbers in Figure 3 we can
see that the impact of Bluetooth is greater for an 802.11g link
with a steep drop with distance. We observe that when the
802.11g transmitter and receiver are separated by a distance
of 15 meters or more, the 24 Mbps link throughput can drop
to less than 3 Mbps.
2) Effect of Autorate on Bluetooth-802.11 Interference:
Another interesting issue here is the behavior of the 802.11
autorate selection algorithm in presence of Bluetooth
interference. To study this effect, we measure the throughput
(using TCP traffic at 11 Mbps) of a 802.11b link with and
without autorate enabled in the three configurations shown
in Figure 4. While a number of WLAN automatic rate
fallback algorithms have been proposed and tested, for our
Topology
Only 11b
11b, BT1
11b, BT1, BT2
Set Rate = 11Mbps
11b
BT1
BT2
5.40
–
–
3.95
0.25
–
2.81
0.24
0.63
Autorate Enabled
11b
BT1
BT2
4.92
–
–
1.92
0.25
–
0.42
0.30
0.69
TABLE II
L INK T HROUGHPUT (M BPS ) WITH AND WITHOUT AUTORATE ENABLED
FOR DIFFERENT TOPOLOGIES
demonstration purpose we use the autorate feature in the
MadWifi driver, which implements the Onoe bit-rate selection
algorithm. From the throughput numbers shown in Table II
we can clearly see that rate reduction in such a scenario
causes longer collision windows and thus lower throughput
in 802.11b. With autorate option enabled in most laptop
802.11b/g cards, this presents a very common example of a
configuration problem that causes loss in throughput.
C. Complex Multi-radio Interference Environment
As a final example of multi-radio interference, we emulate
a complex small office environment consisting of multiple
802.11b, 802.11g, Bluetooth and ZigBee radios distributed
throughout the premises. As shown in Figure 5 an 802.11b
node on channel 1 forms the main access point to which
four clients are connected. Two additional 802.11g links on
channels 1 and 11 respectively support point to point devices
such as set-top box to TV or projector. A fifth 802.11b link on
channel 11 emulates point to point file transfer in this scenario.
As is common in commercial premises, there are neighboring
APs within the interference region of the environment, here
depicted by an 802.11g AP on the top-left with two clients.
Some three Bluetooth constant bit rate transmissions add to the
radio clutter with one of the Bluetooth nodes being co-located
with the 802.11g node. A number of low cost ZigBee sensors
form a part of the security/temperature control infrastructure
and relay periodic readings to a central ZigBee concentrator
in this scenario.
This topology was studied under varying traffic conditions
and an example configuration is mentioned in Table III. The
last column from the table shows that when all the links are
active, a drop of more than 50% of the nominal throughput is
observed for almost all links in the network. In this particular
case, for example, throughput of link B1 drops by about 93%,
while that of BT1 and all the ZigBee links drops by 89% and
97% respectively making them extremely problematic from a
user’s perspective.
G2
G1
kinds of traces. Traces are collected and synchronized using
the Orbit Measurement Library (OML) [13] framework which
is built on a client-server architecture ideal for such modular
additions. Some details on each of the monitoring tools are as
follows:
Channel 1
ZigBee
Concentrator
BT2
BT1
~ 20 meters
B2
B1
•
B3
Channel 1
G3
B4 Channel 11
G4
Channel 1
BT3
Channel 11
802.11b Node
802.11g Node
Bluetooth Node
Zigbee Node
B5
Fig. 5.
•
Multi-radio Interference Topology
Traffic
Configuration
Saturation TCP
11 Mbps data rate
CBR UDP
10 Mbps offered load
Saturation TCP
54 Mbps data rate
CBR UDP
512 kbps offered load
Periodic 50 Bytes
at 250 kbps
Links
B1, B2,
B3, B4
B5
G1, G2,
G3, G4
BT1, BT2,
BT3
ZigBee Nodes
Throughput as
% of nominal
6.9, 16.4
14.2, 21.5
66.9
50.9, 43.9
24.3, 25.9
11.9, 24.9
39.8
3.1
•
•
TABLE III
T RAFFIC CONFIGURATIONS OF THE LINKS USED IN THE TOPOLOGY OF
F IGURE 5
Emulation Data from
Representative
Problem Scenarios
Network Discovery and
Diagnosis Tools
•
802.11 Probing in Monitor mode
Diagnosis Inference
Algorithm
Bluetooth Spectrum sensing
Zigbee Channel Sniffing
Direct
Configuration
Change
Collection &
Integration
Server
Framework
Low-cost Spectrum Analyzer
Device side performance logs
Network Layer Info from Wired -end
Fig. 6.
Performance
Improvement &
QoS Support
Control
Channel
Use of Common
Channel for
Control
System Level Model
IV. I NTERFERENCE D IAGNOSIS S YSTEM
Figure 6 shows the overall structure of our diagnosis system
which consists of a set of network monitoring tools which
log traces to a central database based on which the diagnosis heuristics identifies and classifies different interference
problems. Although each different kind of monitor shows a
different view of the wireless environment producing output
traces in different formats, the aim of our system is to converge
the traces into a common sqlite database format to get full
advantage of correlation algorithms that run across multiple
•
802.11 Probing: We use a modified form of the tcpdump
tool using the libpcap packet capture library to log the
headers of all packets received on the WiFi interface card.
Multiple logs of the same packet received by different
monitor nodes are purged and synchronized keeping only
the timestamp and RSSI from these repeat traces for
localization information.
Bluetooth Spectrum Sensing: Since the frequency hopping scheme employed in Bluetooth transmissions make
it hard to passively monitor, we employ a spectrum
sensing technique as described in [14] to estimate of the
number of active Bluetooth transmissions and their traffic
load.
ZigBee Channel Sniffing: We employ a passive
frequency-hopping listener application built upon the
TinyOS platform to log and aggregate the packets received over the ZigBee interface. These are then ported
to the OML server keeping the tables in sync with other
monitors.
Spectrum Analyzer: A low-cost coarse resolution spectrum analyzer like [15] can provide a means to detect
other sources of RF emissions, for example that from
cordless phones, leaking microwave ovens, etc. Since
these devices are commonplace in a SOHO environment,
we employ this additional monitor to diagnose such
interference problems.
Device-side Logs: Interference being a receiver side
phenomenon, can be best detected from the user device
involved in the transmission. As such, we have an optional device side logging mechanism which records the
changes in throughput, delay and received power.
Wired-end Information: With some prior knowledge
about the devices, the wired-side logs from the AP, for
example, can provide information about the logical topology of the system which helps the diagnosis algorithm to
narrow down on the interfering links.
V. D IAGNOSIS E XAMPLE : I NTERFERENCE TO HD V IDEO
In this section, we provide a detailed example of how
the proposed data-centric approach can be used to diagnose
possible interference related problems in a specific real world
application - that of high-rate video transmissions. Due to
its high bandwidth and low delay requirements, Wireless HD
streaming presents itself as an important problem in the SOHO
environment that our work is focussed on. As an initial case
study, we define four possible interferences to a video stream
in a home environment and subsequently elaborate on the key
parameters that can be used to characterize and diagnose each
of these problems.
Link
Occupancy
Neighbor
AP 1
Link 2
Video Link 1
Bluetooth
1.20pb
pb
Baseline
Own AP
Link 6
Monitor
Bluetooth
Link 4
Link 3
0.5pb
Slow Link*
0.3pb
Link 5
Fig. 7.
Neighbor
AP 2
Representative topology for Video Streaming Example
Congestion
Slow Link
Same AP*
rb
3rb
5rb
% Retransmission
Fig. 8. Interference Diagnosis Regions on the Occupancy vs Retransmission
plot. (*Requires Secondary Test)
A. Topology Setup
To emulate a small home network, we ran our experiments
based on the representative topology shown in Figure 7. In
Figure 7, link 1 is the main video stream, with the distance
between the transmitter and receiver being close to 10 meters.
The VLC application is used to emulate the video link and a
CBR 15 Mbps video at a transmit rate of 54 Mbps is used as
the stream.
Links 2 and 3 represent other user devices connected to the
same AP and both of them generate approximately 1 Mbps
TCP data traffic at 54 Mbps link speed with constant interdeparture time and Pareto-distributed packet length with mean
450 bytes. Links 4 and 5 are independent AP-client pairs that
emulate neighboring links outside the home, quite commonly
found in such a setting. These links carry 2 Mbps data traffic
at 54 Mbps each with the same characteristics as that of links 2
and 3. There is also a Bluetooth pair close to the video receiver
which carries a CBR UDP 512 kbps on-off data stream. In the
rest of this section, we work with the following four types of
interferences to the video link under a reasonable assumption
that only one of the four problems dominate the video quality
at a given point of time:
• Bluetooth Interference
• Slow link on the same AP
• Slow link on a neighboring AP
• Channel Congestion
While this presents a small selection from the wide variety
of interferers present in a home environment, all of the listed
problems are very common for home networks and in this case
study, we show how a passive observation of the various link
transmissions can be used to filter out signatures that can be
ascribed to each of these problems.
Here we define link occupancy as the fraction of time for
which this link was transmitting data and includes both
primary and the retransmissions. These two parameters are
aggregated using a 200ms sliding window to avoid unrelated
artifacts and reduce storage requirement. The classification of
the four problem scenarios, based on these two parameters
are shown in Figure 8 which is explained later in this section.
To have an idea of the parameter values for a healthy case of
nominal traffic on all interfering 802.11 links and no Bluetooth
interference, the baseline operating point is marked in the
figure which shows 2.8% retransmissions and link occupancy
ratio of about 0.24. In addition to this baseline traffic, the effect
of each of the four problems show up in slightly different ways
as follows:
B. Classification Parameters
c) Slow link on Same AP: : As seen in section III,
a slow link in the network can cause problems for other
high-speed links by occupying the shared channel for a large
amount of time. This is mostly followed by a slight increase in
retransmissions as the number of collisions increase compared
to the baseline case. For the emulation, link 2 of Figure 7 is
converted to a slow 1 Mbps link while all other links carry
their normal traffic.
As the case with any other kind of diagnostics, in order
to say ‘Problem X occurred due to reason Y’, we need to
first identify the parameters that show the ‘symptoms’ of the
problem and then classify the multi-dimensional parameter
space with appropriate hyperplanes. We found that the two
most important parameters for the problems mentioned above
are the per-link percentage-retransmission and the occupancy.
a) Bluetooth Interference: : Since Bluetooth only corrupts some packets at random, the transmitter still sees the
channel as unoccupied as before and tries to counter the errors
by retransmissions which in turn increases the link occupancy.
Thus in this case, there is an increase in both the occupancy as
well as the percentage retransmission. In our experiments, we
create this case by turning on the Bluetooth link along with the
video link. Other 802.11 links (2,3,4 and 5) were also turned
on with their nominal traffic flow.
b) Channel Congestion: : When there are a number of
high-speed 802.11 links in the same contention region, each
one gets only a fraction of the channel occupancy and also
the number of collision induced errors increases. Hence this
gives rise to a large drop in occupancy accompanied by an
increase in the percentage retransmission. We emulate this by
turning on all the 802.11 links with 15 Mbps UDP data traffic
at 54Mbps link speed.
Interference Type
Bluetooth - Distance 1m
Bluetooth - Distance 6m
Bluetooth - Distance 11m
Slow Link - Rate 1Mbps, Dist 1m
Slow Link - Rate 1Mbps, Dist 15m
Slow Link - Rate 11Mbps, Dist 1m
Slow Link - Rate 11Mbps, Dist 15m
Congestion - 4 links, Traffic 20Mbps
Congestion - 4 links, Traffic 5Mbps
Congestion - 3 links, Traffic 20Mbps
% ReTx
18.0
16.5
13.6
4.9
3.2
6.5
7.2
16.4
10.1
9.8
Occu.
0.39
0.33
0.24
0.07
0.08
0.12
0.17
0.10
0.17
0.12
Diagnosis
X
X
x
X
X
X
x
X
x
X
TABLE IV
D IAGNOSIS O UTPUT FOR THE PROPOSED HEURISTIC ALGORITHM OVER
DIFFERENT INTERFERENCE CASES
d) Slow link on Other AP: : In this case, link 4 is made
a slow link by changing its transmission rate to 1 Mbps, while
the other links still carry the baseline traffic. Here, we observed
that the fall in occupancy is less than that in case of the
slow link, same AP case, but the effect on both occupancy
and percentage retransmissions is qualitatively the same. This
ambiguity between the same AP and other AP cases can be
solved by using the information about AP MAC addresses in
the diagnosis algorithm.
An important point in the above discussion and in Figure 8
is the value of the thresholds that divide the different regions.
The values specified in Figure 8 are heuristic bounds that
we observed from multiple trials under different traffic and
rate conditions. The thresholds are also chosen relative to
the baseline values, Occupancy = pb and Retransmission
percentage = rb , which makes the thresholds robust for
streaming video transmissions of any rate.
C. Experimental Verification
Table IV lists the different configurations that we tested
our algorithm on and also shows the average values of the
two relevant parameters. The interference configurations are as
mentioned in the table, for example in the Bluetooth case, we
vary the distance between the video receiver and the Bluetooth
pair and Table IV shows the corresponding results for distances
1, 6 and 11 meters. Based on the thresholds, the algorithm
correctly diagnoses the presence of Bluetooth interference in
the first two cases while it fails in the 11m case due to the
relatively less impact of the interference on the main link.
Similarly, in case of a slow link interference, when the slow
link data rate is set to 11 Mbps and its distance from the main
link is 15m, the occupancy level goes above the threshold
causing the algorithm to declare a ‘no-problem’ case. The
congestion case is emulated using varying number of extra
high-speed links and also varying the amount of TCP traffic
that each link carries. The traces record an occupancy level
of 0.17 in the case of 4 competing links with 5Mbps TCP
traffic each and thus do not indicate the existence of a problem.
These results are as expected given that the algorithm detects
Bluetooth interference, slow links or congestion only when it
is strong and thus significant enough to affect the HD video
quality.
VI. C ONCLUSION
AND
F UTURE
WORK
The experimental results in this paper outline the impact of
inter-radio interference and show that in typical topologies,
the effect of one radio class on others causes significant
reductions in the throughput. In particular, we show some
common scenarios like slow link - fast link interference
in 802.11, co-located Bluetooth and 802.11 radios, and a
dense deployment of both Bluetooth and ZigBee radios, and
benchmark the loss in usable throughput in each case. We
have also introduced a framework for multi-radio monitoring
which provides the basis for diagnosis of interference related
problems. The basic building blocks of the system consists of a
set of monitors and a database server that collects packet traces
to be used for diagnosis. A simple multi-parameter threshold
based classification method was shown to diagnose common
types of problems quite effectively. Future work is planned on
more robust diagnosis methods based on statistical analysis
and machine learning techniques.
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