Poster: Characterizing the performance of WiFi in dense IoT deployments

With the advent of the internet of things, the number of wireless devices and the amount of wireless data traffic is increasing at an unprecedented rate. By 2020, the number of connected devices per person is expected to exceed 6.58. Due to the ubiquitous availability of IEEE 802.11n/ac (i.e., WiFi) in most modern homes and enterprise environments, the majority of the new home and enterprise-focused IoT devices that are entering the market use IEEE 802.11n/ac to connect to the internet. Our literature survey revealed that there are no prior measurement studies on the performance of IEEE 802.11n/ac’s MAC in dense IoT environments. Thus, in this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study of various aspects of IEEE 802.11n/ac’s MAC using real IoT devices and realistic IoT workloads and present several useful observations that demonstrate the need to revise some of the key aspects of IEEE 802.11n/ac’s MAC to make it suitable for dense IoT environments. We conducted our study on a real testbed comprising a large number of Raspberry Pis deployed in a real-world environment and studied the impact of the density and type of IoT traffic on the throughput and frame aggregation sizes of the wireless system. We further studied the impact of TCP’s congestion control mechanism on the performance of IEEE 802.11n/ac’s MAC.