Traffic Shifting based Resource Optimization in Aggregated IoT Communication

Aggregated Internet of Things (IoT) communication aims to use core network resources efficiently by providing cellular access to a group of IoT devices over the same subscriber identity. Leveraging the low data rates and long data sending intervals of IoT devices, several of the IoT devices in the same serving area of the core network are grouped together and take turns to send their data to their servers without causing overlaps in their communication. In this paper, we take this approach further and benefiting from the flexibility in data sending schedules, we aim to increase savings in cellular resources by shifting (delaying or performing earlier) the regular traffic patterns of IoT devices slightly. To this end, we consider two different traffic shifting models, namely, consistent and inconsistent shifting. We first solve the optimal aggregation of IoT devices under each model by using Integer Linear Programming (ILP). In order to avoid the high complexity of ILP solution, we then develop a heuristic based solution that runs in polynomial time. Through simulations, we show that heuristic based solution provides close to optimal results in various scenarios and shifting based aggregated communication offers more resource optimization (i.e., smaller number of bearers needed to connect all IoT devices) than the aggregated communication with no shifting.