Indoor Performance Evaluation of ESP-NOW

ESP-NOW is a connection-less communication pro-tocol developed by the semiconductor manufacturer Espressif Systems for their in-situ low power IEEE802.11-enabled Internet of Things devices. In this paper, we conduct a number of exper-iments to evaluate the performance of ESP-NOW in an indoor environment. More specifically, we assess the protocol performance in terms of achieved range, packet delivery ratio, and penetration capability using commonly used off-the-shelf devices. Furthermore, we conduct a power characterization of the protocol under different operating modes and compare its power consumption to that of a typical WiFi approach. The evaluation results show that environmental factors such as reflections and obstacles heavily affect the overall performance. Nevertheless, the comparison with the WiFi approach showed an improved indoors range of 15% in terms of packet delivery ratio and more than 30% in terms of power consumption.