Short-range communications within emerging wireless networks and architectures: A survey

The paper presents an overview of known approaches to evaluate performance of short-range communication technologies, when handling diverse types of traffic, generated by several recently emerging applications. In particular, very specific cases, like machine-to-machine communications, heterogeneous networking and device-to-device communications are considered. These scenarios have some specific traffic patterns, on one hand, and a number of supplementary requirements for network performance characteristics, on the other. Due to such a gap, there is a strong need for adapting well-known evaluation techniques with respect to listed priority changes, which gives motivation for our work. The paper presents commonly-used set of three evaluation strategies: analytical approach, simulation and measuring. For each of those a classification of know techniques is presented, as well as their applicability assessment for named developing applications. Possibility of combining techniques from different strategies to decrease the level of uncertainty is also discussed. Finally, some useful pieces of advice related to emerging applications performance prediction are given.