Analytical Modelling and Performability Evaluation of LTE as Dominant Connectivity Technology for Internet of Things

Abstract

The future network standards, Long Term Evolution (LTE), has been designed to operate at high speeds for wireless and mobile communication. The exact time at which LTE becomes the dominant connectivity technology in the Internet of Things (IoT) is not certain, however it is clear that's where the world of communications is headed and the time is approachingquickly as for both IoT and LTE adaptations are growing rapidly. In many practical systems, failures are expected and they have a significant effect on the system's performance. The wireless and mobile systems are prone to failures and such systems do not have a simple product form solution. This is because of the irregularities caused by the wireless channel failures. The study of such systems is important because system failures and repairs can affect the QoS measurements of the systems significantly. In this paper, mobile wireless channels of LTE based cellular networks are analysed using queueing theory. The characteristics of wireless channel are considered in abstract level as well as channel unavailability. The model is based on previous work in performance modelling and availability modelling of such systems. Markov Reward Model (MRM) method is used to obtain various QoS measures. The results explicitly show that failures and repairs affect the system performance significantly.