Cross-platform Interference: Locating wifi devices with ZigBee sensor networks

ZigBee is a popular short-range wireless communication protocol and has been widely adopted by wireless sensor networks, which runs on the same 2.4G band with WiFi. When wireless sensor networks with WiFi nodes run on overlapped bands, their signals could generate interferences with each other, and then wireless sensor networks could detect WiFi signal in this situation. In this paper, we propose an effective way to detect WiFi signal in wireless sensor networks and build signal attenuation model of WiFi signal to locate WiFi nodes. In our experiments, we set up wireless sensor network of 49 nodes to evaluate our methods. The evaluation shows that our WiFi signal detection and localization methods work and achieve relative high accuracy.