Developing new connectivity architectures for local sensing and control IoT systems

Abstract

While improvement can be done in every component of the Internet of Things (IoT) as an evolving technology, this work focuses on connectivity. Currently, the main in-building connectivity technology for IoT enterprise deployments is the low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN). However, despite the low power and complexity, the two main issues of the LR-WPAN are very slow data access and short coverage range. To address these issues, 802.11ax can be a promising alternative due to its new IoT-oriented features that explicitly target the resource-constraint requirements. This work proposes and implements two IoT connectivity architectures to deploy the 11ax protocol stack in the sensor motes for sensing the environment and also in the backhaul link to collect and relay the sensed data to the remote processing server. The LR-WPAN is also implemented to be utilized as the baseline and reference point for comparison purposes. Furthermore, a decision model with two integrated modules is proposed to measure and evaluate the performance of the proposed architectures on the basis of the IoT requirement factors that directly contribute to IoT efficiency. The model includes an extensive set of IoT use cases to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed architectures and determine their contribution to performance enhancement of the IoT systems.