A multi-protocol system for configurable data streaming on IoT healthcare devices

We present a multi-protocol communication system designed for IoT devices in healthcare application scenarios and targeted to maximize the tradeoff between data-rate, transmission range, and power consumption. The system implements a WiFi, Bluetooth, and a LoRaWAN protocol entirely, thereby offering a highly-configurable spectrum of low-power local/wide area network connectivity. Moreover, an optimized protocol on the top of this stack permits to extend to dozens of km the network range in the LPWAN configuration, thank to multihop range extension on LoRaWAN (E-LoRaWAN). The system has been conceived for personal and wearable IoT-healthcare devices that must always be operating and follow users during daily life activity worldwide indoor and outdoor. A dedicated software stack permits to switch seamlessly from a long range to a short range protocol and allows the healthcare device to adapt and modulate the local data processing and the application throughput. Our solution outperforms similar multi-standard systems by a factor of 2 in energy-per-bit and in communication range.