Interference Analysis of Microwave RFID and 802.11b WLAN

The proliferation of IEEE 802.11 b WLAN (Wi-Fi), which occupies the 2.4-2.4835 GHz frequency bands, make the 2.4 GHz ISM unlicensed band more crowded. At the same time, the RFID technology emerged and will be widely deployed. RFID use diverse frequency bands from low frequency (LF) to microwave, including 2.4 GHz ISM bands too. Hence, when 2.45 GHz RFID systems collocate with 802.11 b, the mutual interference is inevitable and their performances will significantly degrade. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of mutual interferences on the performance of 2.45 GHz RFID and 802.11 b systems. A mathematical model is proposed to analyze the mutual interference, and packet error rate (PER) is used as the performance metric. The simulation results of 802.11 b´s PER are illustrated, which compared with the theoretical results, to evaluate the performance degradation of the interference.