ShuttleBus: Dense Packet Assembling with QUIC Stream Multiplexing for Massive IoT

In this paper, we investigate dense short packet forwarding for clustering-based massive Internet-of-Things (mIoT). The objective is to support the data forwarding with minimal communication overhead while satisfying the differentiated latency constraints from the transport layer perspective. To this end, we propose a dense packet assembling scheme, named ShuttleBus, for forwarding devices in mIoT to achieve effective data merging. The assembling scheme is designed based on the stream multiplexing mechanism of the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol. With ShuttleBus, the payload data sent from IoT devices are extracted as independent frames belonging to different data streams. The ShuttleBus can bundle data frames from multiple streams into a single packet while ensuring data integrity of these streams. Furthermore, we develop a resilient packing mechanism in packet assembling to merge data received from IoT devices within a cluster. In addition, a latency-oriented scheduling mechanism for backlogged QUIC data is established to guarantee satisfactory delivery of diverse transmission tasks. To accommodate the dynamic network environment, we tailor a learning-based algorithm to determine the optimal packet assembling time adaptively. We evaluate the performance of ShuttleBus under various network load conditions. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces communication overhead and enhances data delivery performance under stringent latency constraints.