Latency Minimization in Wireless IoT Using Prioritized Channel Access and Data Aggregation

Future Internet of Things (IoT) networks are expected to support a massive number of heterogeneous devices/sensors in diverse applications ranging from eHealthcare to industrial control systems. In highly-dense deployment scenarios such as industrial IoT systems, providing reliable communication links with low-latency becomes challenging due to the involved system delay including data acquisition and processing latencies at the edge-side of IoT networks. In this regard, this paper proposes a priority-based channel access and data aggregation scheme at the Cluster Head (CH) to reduce channel access and queuing delays in a clustered industrial IoT network. First, a prioritized channel access mechanism is developed by assigning different Medium Access Control (MAC) layer attributes to the packets coming from two types of IoT nodes, namely, high-priority and low-priority nodes, based on the application-specific information provided from the cloud-center. Subsequently, a preemptive M/G/1 queuing model is employed by using separate low-priority and high- priority queues before sending aggregated data to the Cloud. Our results show that the proposed priority-based method significantly improves the system latency and reliability as compared to the non-prioritized scheme.