A virtual gateway media access placement approach for large-scale Internet of Things

The virtualisation of the Internet of Things (IoT) Gateway (GW) Media Access Control (MAC) component separates the GW MAC functions from the GW device by deploying the GW MAC functions in a selected remote edge Data Centre (eDC). This concept can help support media access for a large number of devices based on concurrent transmissions over Radio Frequency (RF) virtualisation. However, the requests for virtual GW MAC instances are dynamic and the virtual network is characterised by varying resource levels and response times. This can affect the throughput performance of the MAC protocol since the timing deadlines of the MAC functions or frame transmissions may not be met. In this work, the GW MAC functions of the IEEE 802.11ah standard for Large Scale IoT (LS-IoT) networks are virtualised as concurrent virtual Access Groups (vAGs) over a proposed Software Defined Network (SDN) virtual network. A virtual GW MAC placement strategy is proposed to optimally select the host for running the virtual GW MAC instances to minimise the virtualisation delay, improve the robustness of the deployment process and maintain a good MAC throughput performance. The results obtained in this work show that the virtualisation delay is minimised and the MAC throughput versus the number of devices is improved especially for high IoT traffic rates when compared to suboptimal approaches and the dedicated localised GW MAC approach.