Design issues in ZigBee-based sensor network for healthcare applications

IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee sensor networks support small power consumption and node expansion compared to other network standards for WSN. Body sensor networks (BSN) require a number of sensors for sensing medical information from human body, and low power consumption to monitor a patient's status for a long time. However, ZigBee has limited bandwidth and is thus hard to support real time data transmission because of the adoption of CSMA-CA as its medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, we will analyze the reasonable number of nodes, size of payload and packet interval for best QoS for such network. It is found that an appropriate MAC parameters setting can improve the QoS compared to the default setting in IEEE 802.15.4 specification. The effective data rate, average end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio are found via simulation for various network settings. The results are useful for the construction of ZigBee networks for patient monitoring and care.