Unobtrusive, Accurate, and Live Measurements of Network Latency and Reliability for Time-Critical Internet of Things

Abstract

Time-Critical Internet of Things (TC-IoT) applications place very stringent communication requirements on underlying networks in terms of latency and reliability. To verify experimentally if wireless networks can fulfill those, an appropriate method to measure latency and reliability needs to be developed. State-of-the-art methods are either obtrusive to and dependent on application setup, or insufficient in accuracy. In this work, we propose a new solution called Unobtrusive Latency Tester (ULT) to measure the latency and reliability of wireless networks for TC-IoT applications. The ULT can be seen as unobtrusive to time-critical applications since the insertion delay is shorter than 1 µs and the accuracy of latency measurements is 40 ns. We apply the ULT in a real-life motion control testbed that uses Wi-Fi 6 and 5G networks. The presented results show the feasibility of the proposed approach. We also provide some initial observations on the latency and reliability of current Wi-Fi 6 and 5G technologies and the possibility of their use for TC-IoT applications.