Performance of distributed coordination function for serving IoT applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects "things"and autonomously exchanges data between them. It is expected that there are more than seven billion of connections interconnected by low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks to support IoT services before 2025. Several LPWA technologies are gaining popularity recently, such as LoRa and NB-IoT. Despite of their advertised advantages over conventional technologies such as low power, long range, and cheap module, several studies and field tests shows that they cannot communicate in long-range, the DIY supporting modules are not really power efficient, and the development are rather expensive. While commercial IoT networks have yet to be widely deployed, many smart connected devices use WiFi-based connectivity. This motivates us to study and evaluate the performance of WiFi's medium access protocol for this new use case of IoT. In the experiment, our proposed analytical model is evaluated against a custom-made Monte Carlo simulation. The result shows that our model is accurate in estimating the system performance in term of normalized throughput.