Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Zigbee Communication: An Experimental Approach with XBee S2C Module

The recent development of wireless communications has prompted many diversified applications in both industrial and medical sectors. Zigbee is a short-range wireless communication standard that is based on IEEE 802.15.4 and is vastly used in both indoor and outdoor applications. Its performance depends on networking parameters, such as baud rates, transmission power, data encryption, hopping, deployment environment, and transmission distances. For optimized network deployment, an extensive performance analysis is necessary. This would facilitate a clear understanding of the trade-offs of the network performance metrics, such as the packet delivery ratio (PDR), power consumption, network life, link quality, latency, and throughput. This work presents an extensive performance analysis of both the encrypted and unencrypted Zigbee with the stated metrics in a real-world testbed, deployed in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The major contributions of this work include (i) evaluating the most optimized transmission power level of Zigbee, considering packet delivery ratio and network lifetime; (ii) formulating an algorithm to find the network lifetime from the measured current consumption of packet transmission; and (iii) identifying and quantizing the trade-offs of the multi-hop communication and data encryption with latency, transmission range, and throughput.