Efficient Network Planning for Internet of Things With QoS Constraints

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, a vast number of (smart) end devices forward their traffic to the Internet, either by direct communication to LTE networks, or by multihop transmissions to a specific gateway. Acquiring both types of communication capabilities for IoT end devices would be unnecessarily costly. Instead, for a cost effective IoT infrastructure, only devices performing as gateways could be fully equipped with such capabilities, while the remaining devices could have simple low cost wireless transceivers, of differing transmission specifications, to forward/relay the traffic toward a gateway. Furthermore, the IoT devices network should comply with specific quality of service (QoS) requirements, specified for each IoT device. In this context, the IoT network planning problem, where we have to select the number of gateways and their locations along with respective transceivers for IoT devices, is key to provide a low cost and QoS aware IoT infrastructure. We formulate the planning problem as an integer linear program (ILP) that minimizes the total cost of the devices deployed in the network, while achieving the mandatory QoS requirements. We also present a heuristic algorithm of lower complexity that was observed to provide solutions near the optimal ones, in scenarios that we tracked optimal solutions with the ILP. A variety of performance evaluation results exhibits the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of network cost and efficiency.