An IoT Traffic Modeling Framework and its Application to Autonomous Edge Scaling

Future wireless networks will exhibit heterogeneity of traffic generating sources originated by numerous Internet of Things (IoT) nodes as well as traditional mobile phones. Moreover, the space of novel IoT services is expanding the simple monitoring tasks of IoT nodes to more complex services in which a node can be in a monitoring state and transition autonomously to an alarm state when predefined conditions are detected. The complexity of the envisioned future wireless networks is indeed new to the community with challenges affecting many aspects such as protocol design and network operation mechanisms. Traffic modeling lies at the core of these issues. As the advancement of technologies continues, faithful performance evaluation measures are dependent on the underlying traffic model. In this scope, we propose a Tiered Markov Modulated Poisson Process (TMMPP) that is capable of capturing IoT traffic characteristics, e.g. patterns and seasonality, which occur in long time spans, e.g days, with the flexibility of modeling different IoT service behaviors. Moreover, we study an autonomous edge scaling mechanism as a use case illustrating the benefits of the proposed TMMPP traffic model.