Handling Inherent Delays in Virtual IoT Gateways

Massive deployment of diverse ultra-low power wireless devices in different application areas has given rise to a plethora of heterogeneous architectures and communication protocols. It is challenging to provide convergent access to these miscellaneous collections of communicating devices. In this paper, we propose VGATE, an edge-based virtualized IoT gateway for bringing these devices together in a single framework using SDRs as technology agnostic radioheads. SDR platforms, however, suffer from large unpredictable delays. We design a GNU Radio-based IEEE 802.15.4 experimental setup using LimeSDR, where the data path is time-stamped at various points of interest to get a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the delays. Our analysis shows that GNU Radio processing and LimeSDR buffering delays are the major delays. We decrease the LimeSDR buffering delay by decreasing the USB transfer size but show that this comes at the cost of increased processing overhead. We modify the USB transfer packet size to investigate which USB transfer size provides the best balance between buffering delay and processing overhead across two different host computers. Our experiments show that for the best measured configuration the mean and jitter of latency decreases by 37% and 40% respectively for the host computer with higher processing resources. We also show that the throughput is not affected by these modifications.