Network Traffic Characteristics of the Iot Application Use Cases
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Network Traffic Characteristics of the IoT Application Use Cases Jozef Mocnej Adrian Pekar Winston K.G. Seah Iveta Zolotova Technical University Victoria University of Wellington Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia New Zealand of Kosice, Slovakia Email: [email protected] Email: adrian.pelar,winston.seah @ecs.vuw.ac.nz Email: [email protected] { } Abstract—The Internet of Things (IoT) is a highly discussed many cases, however, this benefit means the communication paradigm aimed at the connection of everyday objects to the of low power devices over lossy networks, which creates high Internet. The idea of enabling objects to communicate with demands on the used technologies. Consequently, we need to each other brings significant benefits, yet there are several challenges that have to be also addressed. In recent years, understand the requirements of IoT application use cases in researchers have developed many solutions to resolve IoT issues order to create more efficient IoT solutions. and enhance the overall evolution. New technologies have been The aim of this paper is to contribute to the highly discussed proposed and existing approaches redefined to meet the specific topic of IoT by looking at IoT application use cases and requirements of IoT. However, the complexity and diversity of describe them from a traffic characteristics perspective. Our the area make the process quite difficult. This paper describes the IoT paradigm and provides an overview of efforts expended objective is to identify as accurately as possible the demands to date. It discusses topics such as IoT definitions, categorisation on networks defined by IoT application scenarios, which of IoT application areas and the greatest IoT challenges. One would help to clarify the requirements that IoT technolo- contribution of this paper is the detailed description of IoT gies need to target. The gained knowledge would not only network technologies and their illustration in a single protocol be beneficial for researchers and developers to create more stack. Another contribution is the definition of network traffic characteristics of IoT application use cases, which aims to help in appropriate IoT network technologies but also for industry to better comprehension of IoT demands on network technologies. better understand business opportunities and to facilitate their This knowledge is crucial not only to propose more efficient decision process about the most suitable network technologies solutions but also improve the network technologies specifically for the particular IoT application. Furthermore, this paper designed for IoT needs. provides an overview of the IoT paradigm and the most current efforts in network technologies specifically designed for IoT. I. INTRODUCTION The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section II The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm based describes the related work and highlights the main contribu- on interconnecting a tremendous number of heterogeneous tions of this paper. Section III introduces the IoT paradigm, end devices and providing the acquired data for all kinds its definitions, application areas and challenges. Section IV of different digital services. The term ‘Internet of Things’ classifies IoT network communication technologies and sum- was first coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 while referring to marises them in one detailed protocol stack. Section V defines a global network of objects connected to Radio Frequency the traffic characteristics of IoT application domains and Identification (RFID) in a supply chain [1]. Since then, many Section VI evaluates the gained knowledge in the aggregated new technologies have emerged and IoT has spread to other scatter charts. Lastly, Section VII presents the conclusion and application areas as well. Nevertheless, the main goal has required future work. always remained the same – to empower computers with their own capabilities of gathering information without a human II. RELATED STUDIES interference. The IoT is a greatly debated topic in academia as well as The idea behind IoT is to extend everyday things with industry. In recent years, researchers have put a lot of effort a computing power and connection to the Internet and en- into IoT and proposed numerous solutions. Due to the novelty able them to sense, compute, communicate and control the and complexity of this paradigm, there has been a continuous surrounding environment. These capabilities are desired in demand for summarising state-of-the-art work and keeping many application use cases due to their potential impact, from researchers up-to-date. This section provides a chronological making our lives easier [2], [3] and safer [4], [5], through overview of the notable survey papers in IoT. improving and simplifying the current processes [6], [7], up Kortuem et al. [10] explored how emerging technologies to creating completely new possibilities and opportunities [8], transform everyday objects into smart objects. The authors’ [9]. IoT offers a new point of view on what kind of data should perceived smart objects to be more than just sensor nodes. be gathered, how often and from which place, so that it would Rather, they defined them as the interactive tools with input be possible to get information that was not available before. In and output capabilities and declared them as the main building blocks of IoT. The survey published in 2010 identified three perspective in order to provide an up-to-date overview of IoT canonical smart object types: activity-aware, policy-aware, and activities with the emphasis on current trends, applications, process-aware objects. used technologies, and major challenges. Finally, Al-Fuqaha In the same year, Atzori et al. [11] surveyed the fundamental et al. [20] proposed another general IoT survey, but this time aspects of IoT and provided an overview of this complex the major part was devoted to the communication protocols. discipline. To reduce the ambiguity, they defined the IoT Understanding network traffic characteristics is essential paradigm as a result of the convergence of three main vi- for all aspects of network design and operation, including sions: things-oriented, Internet-oriented, and semantic-oriented protocol design, resource provisioning, network management, vision. Moreover, they emphasised the potential applications and modeling and simulation [21]. The Poisson arrival process and open issues requiring further research. As they claimed has been used to model call arrivals in telecommunication in the conclusion, the technologies back in 2010 could have networks due to its analytical simplicity [22]. However, it has made the IoT concept feasible but the lack of scalability and been found to be unsuitable for new network traffic types that efficiency were the major drawbacks. have emerged from fundamental Internet protocols like TCP Bandyopadhyay et al. [12] studied the state-of-the-art of and applications like TELNET and FTP [23]. New applications IoT in 2011 and presented the key technological drivers, like video streaming bring with them new traffic models that potential applications, challenges and future research areas. are necessary for traffic engineering [24]. While understand- They observed the growing interest in IoT solutions from the ing the demands on the traffic characteristics is crucial for governance but raised the concern that without standardisation, proposing efficient solutions, a detailed study of various IoT the proliferation of applications would lead to a fragmentation network traffic characteristics is still not available. This is the of IoT, which could hamper its popularity and slow down the key motivation of this survey that distinguishes us from other overall progress. published surveys. Nonetheless, we also aimed to target the In 2012, the fragmentation of IoT communities had become typical survey topics and publish the updated state-of-the-art a real obstacle. Miorandi et al. [13] targeted this issue noting in IoT, as well as recap the already presented knowledge in that the researchers were too focused on the specific applica- the more compact format; this is our first contribution. Second, tion domains, which the authors perceived to be potentially we analysed IoT application use cases in order to define their harmful to the development and successful adoption of IoT network traffic characteristics. technologies. Therefore, they provided a holistic perspective on the IoT concept together with the relevant application III. IOT PARADIGM fields, enabling technologies, and research challenges. Their This section provides a general overview of the Internet objective was to help in bridging the existing communities of Things paradigm, including its definition, domain coverage and encourage cross-collaboration. and challenges to date. In 2013, Gubbi et al. [14] looked at the Internet of Things from the perspective of cloud computing and presented a A. IoT definitions cloud-centric vision for worldwide implementation of IoT, proposing a cloud-centric IoT architecture with the platform- The diversity of IoT and the rapid progress resulting from as-service called ‘Aneka’ that connects private and public the vast research being done has inevitably led to the lack of clouds to one solution. a standardised definition of IoT. Consequently, various defini- The growing volume of data generated by IoT devices tions have been put forth by researchers and standardisation motivated Perera et al. [15] to survey IoT from the context- organisations, including: aware perspective. As