TSCH Networks for Health IoT: Design, Evaluation and Trials in the Wild

Sensing technology and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to solve major societal challenges associated with healthcare provision. Yet, to fully meet this potential, Health IoT applications must be supported by dependable data collection infrastructures. In this context, low-power wireless protocols for residential Health IoT applications are characterized by high reliability requirements, the need for an energy-efficient operation, and the need to operate robustly in diverse environments and in presence of external interference. To address these challenges, we enhance the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol from the IEEE 802.15.4 standard with a new schedule and an adaptive channel selection mechanism to increase its performance in this domain. Our evaluation in a test house shows that for our e-Health application, the enhanced system shows better results than both the standard TSCH and state-of-the-art options such as the SmartMesh IP stack, the Orchestra scheduler, and the 6top distributed scheduling mechanism. Results from 29 long-term residential deployments confirm the suitability for the application. The results show 99.96 % average reliability in the uncontrolled environments for networks that generate 7.5 packets per second on the average.