Performance Evaluations for IEEE 802.15.4-based IoT Smart Home Solution

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be a market-changing force for a variety of real-time applications such as e-healthcare, home automation, environmental monitoring, and industrial automation. Low power wireless communication protocols offering long lifetime and high reliability such as the IEEE 802.15.4 standard have been a key enabling technology for IoT deployments and are deployed for home automation recently. The issues of the IEEE 802.15.4 networks have moved from theory to real world deployments. The work presented herein intends to demonstrate the use of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in recent IoT commercial products for smart home applications: the Smart Home Starter Kit. The contributions of the paper are twofold. First, the paper presents how the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is employed in Smart Home Starter Kit. In particular, network topology, network operations, and data transfer mode are investigated. Second, network performance metrics such as end-to-end (E2E) delay and frame reception ratio (FRR) are evaluated by experiments. In addition, the paper discusses several directions for future improvements of home automation commercial products