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These days, there are a lot of products that are working on 2.4 GHz RF - mobiles, laptops etc using 2.4 GHz wifi, earphones using BT, home automation products using 2.4 GHz zigbee. Though these different wireless technologies work slightly different, have different packet structures, and can work on slightly different frequency channels, how successful such a solution be in the long run with a growing number of devices?

Here is a practical example of a house using home automation products. The wireless device list will look somewhat like this:

4 laptops using wifi, 4 TVs using wifi, 6 mobile phones using wifi, 4 headphones using bluetooth, 100 home automation products using zigbee.

Wifi network will typically carry a lot of data and zigbee network will be carrying less amount of data but at frequent intervals.

Is such a network sustainable in the long run from RF interference perspective? My concern stems from the fact that many companies are making products that utlize this band and a lot of these products will go in relatively larger numbers in a home. A wifi router supporting 5-10 devices is one thing but will it translate successfully to 100-200 devices?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Somewhat related: electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/481757/… \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 11:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ The more devices you have using the same band, the more collisions will happen. So datarates will go down as devices have to re-try to send the data. Realize that it also depends on how the devices are used. Obviously a couple of devices transferring huge amounts of data will have a higher impact than a temperature sensor which sends a small data packet every few minutes. In the end, there is no clear answer, at some point some devices will become unusable, when and how that happens depends on usage but also your definition of "unusable". \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 11:54

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how successful such a solution be in the long run with a growing number of devices?

That's part long-answered (there's libraries full of research into cooperative, non-cooperative, and cognitive medium access control), and partly an ongoing topic of research.

Generally, in these bands, there's strict legal requirements that your device cannot simply occupy the channel for as long as it wants. It needs to limit itself in time, or try to find out whether someone else tries to use the channel, or both.

Also, power control inherently becomes a must in dense network: you're no longer SNR-limited, your interference (SIR) limited, so "shouting louder" makes your life worse (just as at a party, there's a point where it becomes to loud to talk).

So, there's not only approaches, but also laws for solving this at smaller scale problems. This breaks down when coverage areas get large – I'm almost certain LoRa won't be sustainable as wide-area covering system in urban areas, simply because it's woefully underequipped to deal with collisions.

4 laptops using wifi, 4 TVs using wifi, 6 mobile phones using wifi, 4 headphones using bluetooth, 100 home automation products using zigbee.

Wifi network will typically carry a lot of data and zigbee network will be carrying less amount of data but at frequent intervals.

Is such a network sustainable in the long run from RF interference perspective?

Yes. Experience tells us this is not a problem, especially since the wifi devices will tend to use the 5 GHz bands to get more bandwidth, anyway, leaving the farther-reaching, potentially lower-rate 2.4 GHz band free for the other systems. Anyway, zigbee very much was designed with such scenarios in mind and should be robust enough. As said, law requires your Wifi devices to leave enough space!

A wifi router supporting 5-10 devices is one thing but will it translate successfully to 100-200 devices?

completely different problem. You won't be connecting 200 devices to a single AP; you will have multiple, cooperating (if possible, even coordinated) APs distributed locally so that each wifi device only needs the minimum possible transmit power – and hence, interference becomes much more limited.

There's a nice corollary to "the more central nodes I can distribute throughout space, the less power my individual mobile nodes will need to communicate with the infrastructure": The more cell towers you put up, the lower the average user's average exposure to RF energy becomes. That's why people protesting against cellular base stations in their neighborhood because they're afraid of being exposed to microwave radiation are counter-productive to their own goal.

The magic word you're looking for here is "network densification": If I serve a large area with just one central node, then, well, the spectrum of that area has to be split among all users. If you make your cells smaller, by using less power, more central nodes, and higher frequencies, you can use the same spectrum in different places at the same time – bingo, higher total throughput.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Wifi using 5 GHz band would be ideal but mass adoption seems like a distant dream at the moment. Most of the users are not tech savvy. They will continue to use 2.4 GHz routers till 5 GHz becomes the new norm. At the same time, too many exciting products are being launched for 2.4 GHz which people would want to try or use. I am just trying to wrap my head around an always busy 2.4 GHz network co-exisitng with a large network of 100s of zigbee/BLE devices - how practical it will be... \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 12:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ it's pretty widely adopted in corporate / campus networks, all the major wired broadband access providers here in Germany ship wifi routers that do both bands by default, even modern entry-level smartphones have 5 GHz wifi, so, doesn't seem that distant a dream, more realistic, to be honest. 5 GHz has become available by default, and it will, as the density problem increases, will also become the absolute go-to. 100 zigbee devices is not "a large network"; it's a small one. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 12:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ Combine that with the fact that chances are, in the future we'll do wifi only for quasi-stationary things (TVs, laptops), and mobile things will be all-5G-cellular by default, and you can see how things get a bit better. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2021 at 12:19
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The Access Point of the network will take care of the problem you are pointing out.

It's more than obvious that if you put in a room 1 Access Point and 100 devices (Stations) downloading or uploading data at 1 Gbps you will have RF congestion problems.

Channels are created in order to have the whole RF system optimizing the available bandwidth.

The well known back-off mechanism help the Access Point synchronize all the Stations.


If you have more than one Access Point in a single room than performance get even worse but the protocol is still able to allocate bandwidth for all the stations.

It's called democracy :-)

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