Abstract - Wireless Local Area Networking standard (Wi-Fi)and the WPAN standard (Bluetooth and Zigbee) productsutilize the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band. Co-existencebetween such wireless technologies within the samefrequency spectrum is crucial to ensure that each wirelesstechnology maintains and provides its desired performancerequirements. This paper provides a brief description of thenewly introduced Zigbee standards including the Physical(PHY) and media access control (MAC) layer. It focuses ondeveloping MatLab/Simulink models for the Zigbeeprotocol and the performance evaluation of these models.Several simulations were run and the results were analyzedfor the different scenarios. The results showed how therelationship between the signal Bit Error Rate (BER) andSignal to Noise Ratio (SNR) was affected when varying thedata rate and power. Furthermore, this paper investigatedthe co-existence of WLAN (IEEE 802.11g) with Zigbee(IEEE 802.15.4 by quantifying potential interferences andexamining the impact on the throughput performance ofIEEE 802.11g and Zigbee devices when co-existing within aparticular environment. The effect of Zigbee on IEEE802.11g was compared with the effect of Bluetooth underthe same operating conditions.

Index Terms-WLAN, Bluetooth, Zigbee, PerformanceAnalysis, IEEE 802.15.4.

Cite: Khaled Shuaib, Maryam Alnuaimi, Mohamed Boulmalf, Imad Jawhar, Farag Sallabi and Abderrahmane Lakas, "Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4: Experimental and Simulation Results," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 29-37, 2007.