Effect of Mobility on the Performance of IoT Networks

The main goal of the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms is to create different kinds of smart cloud data services that can respond in real-time to large amounts of sensor data received across these links. Although it has been more than twenty years since the first IoT networks were used, there are still several performance issues that need to be mitigated. This is a challenging issue since IoT scenarios have a wide range of requirements from the network. This led researchers to design different application layer messaging protocols to satisfy these requirements. While several studies investigate the messaging protocols in terms of performance, reliability, security, and energy consumption, almost none of them consider mobility in their comparisons. In this study, we analyze the effect of mobility on the performance of IoT networks. We established a simulation testbed using Netsim Simulator and conducted a set of experiments to observe the effect of mobility on the application layer protocols; HTTP and CoAP. Our results show that mobility can have a significant effect on the throughput, delay and battery consumption of the messaging protocols under consideration.