Performance simulations of WLAN and Zigbee in electricity substation impulsive noise environments

A physical layer performance evaluation of WLAN (IEEE 802.11b) and Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4) receivers in the presence of impulsive noise is presented. Broadband impulsive noise is modeled as a Symmetric Alpha-Stable process. The parameters of the impulsive noise model are estimated from data recorded from an electricity transmission substation (ETS). The results show that the performance degradation of the Zigbee receiver is small whilst the WLAN receiver may suffer more significant degradation.