Towards efficient coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH and IEEE 802.11

The IEEE 802.11 and the IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH were designed with different goals in mind and both play important roles for respective applications. However, they suffer from mutual interference and experience degraded performance while operating in the same space and spectrum band. To improve this situation we propose an approach to enable a cooperative control for sharing time and frequency. The Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) based sensor network is expected to occupy an only small share of time. We develop mechanism enabling over-the-air synchronization of the Wi-Fi network with the tightly synchronized TSCH based sensor network. We demonstrate that Wi-Fi network can avoid transmitting in the "collision periods". We provide the full design for which we have developed and tested a prototype implementation based on the Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices.