A Simulation Study on the Impact of IoT Traffic in a Smart-city LTE Network

The massive introduction of traffic from the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly in smart-city scenarios, needs to be supported by a steady, pervasive and reliable communication infrastructure. Cellular networks, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G, are considered a popular solution to support the increasing amount of traffic from IoT, especially in smart cities. However, a massive deployment of IoT devices in existing cellular infrastructures can jeopardize the communication of human users and the overall network performance. In this study, the coexistence of IoT traffic and human users in a smart-city LTE infrastructure was studied through simulation using the SimuLTE software. Real geographical data were employed on the position of LTE base stations and IoT devices, retrieved from publicly available sources. Key network indicators, such as user throughput and cell utilization, were adopted to analyze both network and user performance. Simulation results showed a considerable performance degradation when IoT traffic is introduced into the network.