Performance analysis of the ZigBee networks in 5G environment and the nearest access routing for improvement

The ZigBee network is widely studied and deployed recently because of its low cost and simplicity features. However, the power consumption issue needs a further improvement since the application requirements are not fully satisfied. The emerging 5G communication technology is characterized by the smarter devices and the native support for the M2M communication. On that basis, the 5G terminals are capable of joining the existing ZigBee networks and have the potential to improve the data transmission. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the ZigBee networks in the 5G environment for different scenarios. Then a nearest access routing (NAR) algorithm based on the physical depth is proposed for different communication types. To reduce the loads in ZigBee networks, the data flow in the neighborhood of 5G terminals is gathered and transmitted via the IP networks. The simulation results showed that NAR effectively share the communication in ZigBee networks. It leads to better performances with higher packet delivery ratio, less hop counts from ZigBee devices, lower latency, fewer packets sent by ZigBee nodes and zero routing overheads.