Research

TSCH Networks for Health IoT: Design, Evaluation and Trials in the Wild. ACM Transactions on Internet of Things

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Abstract

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to solve major societal challenges associated with healthcare provision. Low-power wireless protocols for residential Health IoT applications are characterized by high reliability requirements, the need for energy-efficient operation, and the need to operate robustly in diverse environments in presence of external interference. We enhance and experimentally evaluate the TimeSlotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol from the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to address these challenges. Our contributions are a new schedule and an adaptive channel selection mechanism to increase the performance of TSCH in this domain. Evaluation in a test house shows that the enhanced system is suitable for our e-Health application and compares favorably with state-of-the-art options. The schedule provides higher reliability compared with the Minimal Scheduling Function from the IETF 6tisch Working Group, and has a better energy-efficiency/reliability tradeoff than the Orchestra scheduler. Results from 29 long-term residential deployments confirm the suitability for the application and show that the system is able to adapt and avoid channels used by WiFi. In these uncontrolled environments, the system achieves 99.96 % average reliability for networks that generate 7.5 packets per second on the average.