Coordinator Traffic Diffusion for Data-Intensive Zigbee Transmission in Real-time Electrocardiography Monitoring

Zigbee is expected to have an explosive growth in wireless medical monitoring systems because it possesses the advantages of low cost, safe power strength, and easy deployment. However, limited work focuses on solving the bottleneck issue at the Zigbee coordinator in a data-intensive system to guarantee transmission reliability of life-critical data. This paper proposes coordinator traffic diffusion (CTD) method to redirect excessive traffic from coordinator to the sink in electrocardiography (ECG) medical application. CTD router, which implements CTD design, automatically redirects ECG data traffic to the sink node without involving the coordinator, and thus reliable real-time ECG monitoring service can be delivered precisely. CTD design is tested in both TI CC2530 Zigbee platform and NS2 simulation. Experimental result demonstrates that a CTD design can assist routers in successfully delivering real-time ECG data samples reliably with the best transmission rate, 24 kb/s. This performance cannot be achieved by the original Zigbee design.