A virtual network model for gateway media access control virtualisation in Large Scale Internet of Things

Abstract

Recent approaches, technologies and standards have been developed to address scalability in very large IoT networks with an emphasis on the Media Access Control (MAC) component. One of the best strategies to manage media access for a large number of devices is to provide concurrent media access. This can be achieved through the concept of Radio Frequency (RF) virtualisation. However, to support such strategies in a Large Scale Internet of Things (LS-IoT) network, the Gateway’s (GW) MAC functions need to equally manage transmissions concurrently otherwise congestion is imminent due to the resource constraints of the GW node. In this work, a virtual media access approach using virtual Access Groups (vAG) for supporting the scalability of Large-Scale IoT (LS-IoT) networks over a virtual network framework is proposed. The virtual network and the impact on the MAC throughput are modelled analytically using the Queuing Network Analyser (QNA) method and the unsaturated throughput model for the IEEE 802.11ah standard. The impact of managing large devices using vAGs for a resource-constrained Gateway MAC is also modelled and the results are compared and analysed. The results obtained suggest that the throughput can be improved for a large number of devices based on vAGs when the GW MAC is virtualised using the proposed framework as opposed to using a dedicated localised GW MAC component.