An applicability assessment of IEEE 802.11 technology for machine-type communications

The concept of the Internet-of-Things suggests huge growth in the number of connected human-unattended objects over the following years. Consequently, this surge in machine-type devices is expected to impact conventional human-to-human communication and thus may potentially hurt network efficiency. Therefore, we target performance assessment of existing WLAN deployments with respect to machine-type communications. This paper addresses an example network topology, where IEEE 802.11 router is used to pass through traffic from multiple wireless devices to the Internet. We propose an evaluation methodology to investigate the adaptability of a conventional WLAN system for machine-type traffic. Some related improvements, such as introducing different techniques of packet aggregation, are considered. Finally, we conclude on the applicability of IEEE 802.11 technology for machine-type communications.