Zigbee and Wifi coexistence

[Lachlanp]

Has anyone had any experience regarding Zigbee and Wifi co-exisitence.

I have been using Zigbee for device-device communication and Ethernet for external web access, but would like to change the ethernet to wifi.

Has anyone had experience of RF staturation of one with the other. I use Zigbee Pro (18dbm) and was proposing to use Wifi at the same power level. They both use 2.4GHz and because both have very good sensitify in their RF front ends, i wonder if co-existance becomes and operational problem.

The alternative is to go with a device that has WiFi/Zigbee as a single solution. Has anyone had experience with these.
I have only seen a few devices Gainspan GS2000, Redpine RS9113.

Another alternative is to replace Zigbee with Wifi-direct. Has anyone tried this? What is the overhead on smaller 8 bit devices that the Netburner must communicate to? Most RF modules have embedded processors with embedded stacks, but sometimes the memory and code requirements forces the use of much larger processors in the field, as the RF embedded processors dont have enough flexibility and/or require knowledge of a differnet processor family.

One problem I see with changing Zigbee to Wifi-direct is that the range could be limited. With Zigbee, 250kbps is satisfactory to 8-bit devices, and most solutions with 18dBm TX/ 90+dbm receive, give good range. If I want the same performance from Wifi-Direct I need to throttle back the speed (e.g. 1MBps), but I still want to maintain high througput back to the Internet. Has anyone had experience with this?

It would of course be great if there was a single solution for both 8-bit devices (AVRxMega/No-RTOS), and Netburner/uCOS where there was good example code for both types of envrionment using SPI interfacing. (But i think i am asking a lot here)

Regards
Lachlan

[Chris Ruff]

Since you are clearly the technology leader on this, can you let the group know what you finally did to mix ZB and WiFi? Thanks, Chris