A low complex spread spectrum scheme for ZigBee based smart home networks

One of the biggest challenges that consumers and service providers have is connecting a wide range of consumer electronics in a smart home environment. Resource planning and bandwidth allocation for these networks in the license free Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) frequency band can not be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose improvements for ZigBee physical layer in order to cope with coexistence issue. A detailed MATLAB/Simulink simulator is developed to achieve our objective. In order to balance the trade-off between multipath effects and receiver complexity, the spreading gain of the conventional Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) scheme is limited to 9dB. Unfortunately, this reduces the interference suppression capability of spread spectrum schemes. Here, we propose a low complex spread spectrum scheme for the ZigBee physical layer. The proposed scheme is shown to be robust against multipath fading and interference with a low complexity.