Performance evaluation of IoT networks: A product density approach

Abstract

Mobile cellular-based Internet of Things (IoT) networking is set to be enhanced with the addition of two important pillars of 5G — massive Machine Type Communications and ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications. Temporal traffic uncertainty from diverse applications in IoT networks mandates novel modeling approaches for performance evaluation. This paper introduces a novel stochastic point process approach that can be used to evaluate the time-dependent performance of IoT base stations. Special correlation functions called Product Densities are used to (a) evaluate time-dependent offered traffic, and (b) analyze delay performance. These performance measures are evaluated at IoT base station for Poisson as well as non-Homogeneous Poisson (Beta distributed) traffic arrival processes suggested by 3rd Generation Partnership Project(3GPP). The Product Density estimates of offered traffic are found to be more accurate than the point-wise stationary approximation (PSA) under non-stationary traffic arrival rates. Results from the proposed analytical model are compared with results from a simulation of two queuing models of the base station; infinite server model for offered traffic and multi-server model for delay performance. Analytical results from Product Density functions also correlate with the simulation outcomes suggesting that the proposed Product Density technique is effective when modeling the time-dependent performance of IoT networks subjected to non-stationary traffic conditions, which reflects the real-world scenario.