Performance analysis of the nRF24L01 ultra-low-power transceiver in a multi-transmitter and multi-receiver scenario

Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are used in various energy constraint applications in industry, medicine, and human motion monitoring. In this paper we analyze the transmission performance of a WSN in a static indoor test setup consisting of 5 to 14 transmitters and up to four receivers. In particular, we consider the nRF24L01 transceiver that implements the proprietary ANT protocol and operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. We conduct tests in over 500 configurations with different message frequencies, packet sizes and number of transmitters. Our tests experimentally point out the tradeoff between rate and package length regarding the number of lost packets. Moreover, we show that using multiple receivers reduces the amount of consecutively lost packages. The obtained results provide valuable insights for drawing conclusions for an application specific device configuration as well as redundancy mechanisms for maximizing the information throughput.