WSN Application Traffic Characterization for Integration within the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect the growing number of sensing and monitoring devices to humans or other devices with the goal of exchanging data or controlling these devices. IoT can be considered as the set of technologies that allow small devices e.g. sensors, which constitute wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that perform specific tasks, to communicate over the Internet Protocol (IP). Cellular networks, especially LTE, are an attractive technology to provide Internet connectivity to these potentially remote devices. In order to allow the cellular networks to connect these devices reliably to the Internet, the traffic of WSNs should be studied to understand their unique requirements on the cellular infrastructure. This is because the existing cellular networks have been traditionally designed mainly to support human to human communication in which case the traffic is completely different than that of WSNs. This paper aims to shed some light on the possible integration challenges that are imposed by the integration of WSNs and LTE which manifest themselves in the difference in traffic characteristics. We perform some experiments to explore the behavior of specific WSN application traffic. We then discuss the possible adaptation that is required for the successfully integration of the two technologies.