Performance analysis of the nRF24L01 ultra-low-power transceiver in a multi-transmitter and multi-receiver scenario

Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are used in various energy constraint applications in industry, medicine, and human motion monitoring. In this paper we analyze the transmission performance of a WSN in a static indoor test setup consisting of 5 to 14 transmitters and up to four receivers. In particular, we consider the nRF24L01 transceiver that implements the proprietary ANT protocol and operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. We conduct tests in over 500 configurations with different message frequencies, packet sizes and number of transmitters. Our tests experimentally point out the tradeoff between rate and package length regarding the number of lost packets. Moreover, we show that using multiple receivers reduces the amount of consecutively lost packages. The obtained results provide valuable insights for drawing conclusions for an application specific device configuration as well as redundancy mechanisms for maximizing the information throughput.

[1]  Jukka Vanhala,et al.  Wireless Measurement System for Bioimpedance and ECG , 2007 .

[2]  Daniel Arthur James.  The Application of Inertial Sensors in Elite Sports Monitoring , 2006 .

[3]  J. D. Janssen,et al.  Assessment of energy expenditure for physical activity using a triaxial accelerometer. , 1994, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[4]  Jun-ichi Takada,et al.  Numerical simulations for dynamic WBAN propagation channel during various human movements , 2011, 2011 5th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology.

[5]  Guang-Zhong Yang,et al.  Body Sensor Networks for Monitoring Rowing Technique , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks.

[6]  Carlos F. García-Hernández,et al.  Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications: a Survey , 2007 .

[7]  Guang-Zhong Yang,et al.  Body Sensor Networks for Sport, Wellbeing and Health , 2010 .

[8]  Daniel Arthur James,et al.  Development of inertial and novel marker-based techniques and analysis for upper arm rotational velocity measurements in tennis , 2010 .

[9]  William Scanlon,et al.  Numerical analysis of bodyworn UHF antenna systems , 2001 .

[10]  Andreas Weder.  An Energy Model of the Ultra-Low-Power Transceiver nRF24L01 for Wireless Body Sensor Networks , 2010, 2010 2nd International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks.

[11]  Yang Hao,et al.  Parametric Study of Wearable Antennas with Varying Distances from the Body and Different On-Body Positions , 2007 .

[12]  Angelo M. Sabatini,et al.  Machine Learning Methods for Classifying Human Physical Activity from On-Body Accelerometers , 2010, Sensors.