Performance analysis of an LTE gateway for the IoT

In the Internet of Things (IoT) the edge devices often rely on gateways to connect to the Internet, to reduce costs and energy consumption. For those scenarios where the gateway itself does not have a wired Internet connection, LTE is a candidate solution due to its high spectral efficiency, bandwidth, and coverage. In this paper, the suitability of LTE for the interconnection of aggregated edge devices is investigated. The study is carried out under the assumption that the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), which is becoming increasingly popular, is used. The performance analysis is carried out through packet-level simulation with the open source simulator ns3.