Impulsive noise rejection for ZigBee communication systems using Error-Balanced Wavelet filtering

The physical (PHY) layer of ZigBee communication systems was defined by IEEE 802.15.4 and has good external white noise resistance due to its spread spectrum characteristic and error correction of the baseband coding process. However, previous research has shown the performance of ZigBee to degrade in the presence of impulsive noise. In this regard, an improvement of the ZigBee receiver is warranted in order to improve the decoding process. A novel Error-Balanced Wavelet filtering approach utilizing the multiresolution property is proposed to suppress the impact of impulsive noise prior to symbol detection and thus improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of the ZigBee demodulation process. This assessment is based on computer simulations and verifies that the overall transmission performance is improved by our proposed approach. The results obtained are also compared with existing impulsive noise suppression approaches and it is shown that our wavelet-based method outperforms other methods in improving the system BER.