Background#

The rapid growth of IoT devices has increased demand for reliable and efficient wireless communication systems. Among the various wireless protocols, Wi-Fi and Zigbee are widely used due to their distinct advantages in terms of data rate and power consumption, respectively. However, both protocols operate in the 2.4 GHz frequency band, which can result in significant interference when they coexist in the same environment. This interference poses a challenge for maintaining stable and reliable communication, especially in dense IoT networks.

PTA is a key solution for addressing the coexistence challenges between Wi-Fi and Zigbee. PTA involves coordinating the transmission and reception of packets between the two protocols to minimize interference and optimize performance. The SiWG917 SoC is designed to support advanced PTA mechanisms, making it an ideal candidate for implementing and testing coexistence strategies in real-world applications.

This application note focuses on the implementation and evaluation of PTA 3-wire coexistence strategies for Wi-Fi and Zigbee on the SiWG917 SoC. The objective is to assess the performance of the SoC under various PTA configurations and to measure the impact on throughput and packet loss for both protocols.

The research involves a comprehensive study of the SiWG917 SoC architecture, including its wireless CPU subsystem, ARM® Cortex®-M4F application MCU, and security and power management features. Detailed experiments are conducted in controlled environments to evaluate the performance of the SoC with different PTA settings. The findings from these experiments will contribute to the development of optimized coexistence strategies that can be applied in practical IoT applications.

This application note explains how to solve coexistence and interference problems to improve the reliability and scalability of wireless communication systems in modern IoT networks.