The impact of packet fragmentation on Internet-of-Things enabled systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a collection of technologies designed to interconnect physical devices with the Internet. Due to device resource constraints IoT connectivity requires the redesign of several basic Internet protocols. This paper studies the impact of packet fragmentation at the data link level on the end-to-end performance of some of these redesigned protocols. Our results show that fragmentation can seriously degrade the performance of a typical IoT device to gateway communication modality. On the other hand, our results also show that with proper design of data broadcast mechanisms, gateway-to-device communication can be maintained at high performance levels. These results can be used as a guide for IoT network engineers.