Performance study on ZigBee-based wireless personal area networks for real-time health monitoring

When multiple ZigBee wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are in close proximity to each other contentions and collisions in transmissions will lead to increased packet delays. However there is no existing study on how delay performance would be affected in a crowded real-life environment where each person walking down a busy street would be wearing a ZigBee WPAN. This letter studies the use of ZigBee WPANs in such a real-life environment for real-time heart beat monitoring. To be pragmatic, we derived a mobility pattern from the analysis of a real-life video trace. Then, we estimated the delay performance from the video trace by combining data collected from ZigBee experiments. The results show that the 300 ms packet delay requirement will not be met for only 11% of the time. When failure occurs, it will last for an average duration of 1.4 s.