Comparison of Wireless Communication Technologies in Remote Monitoring Systems

Nowadays, remote monitoring systems based on wireless communication technologies, are used in elderly care facilities and child day-care centers. In these systems, a ZigBee network with advantages of low energy consumption, flexibility and large network capacity has been used. Previous researchers proposed a system with XBee modules that are made by Digi international Inc. and widely used in the ZigBee network. Moreover, the XBee module can support not only the original ZigBee network but also a special DigiMesh network. These two networks have different performance in network construction and data transmission. Therefore, it should be compared to ensure the system stability that which network is better in network construction speed and packet loss rate. In this paper, several experiments under different environment have been designed to evaluate the performance of the remote monitoring system on the ZigBee network and the DigiMesh network.