Efficient quality of service-aware packet chunking scheme for machine-to-machine cloud services

With the recent advances in machine-to-machine communications, huge numbers of devices have become connected and massive amounts of traffic are exchanged. Machine-to-machine applications typically generate small packets, which can profoundly affect the network performance. Namely, even if the packet arrival rate at the router is lower than the link bandwidth, bits per second, it can exceed the router forwarding capacity, which indicates the maximum number of forwarded packets per second. This will cause the decrease in the network throughput. Therefore, eliminating the packets per second limitation by chunking small packets will enable machine-to-machine cloud services to spread further. This paper proposes new packet-chunking schemes aimed at meeting both application requirements and improving achievable router throughput. In our schemes, multiple buffers, each of which accommodates packets classified based on their delay requirement, are installed in parallel. Herein, we report on analysis of the theoretically performance of these schemes, which enabled us to derive some important features. We also propose a scheme whereby a single chunking buffer and parallel multiple buffers were arranged in tandem. Through our simulation and numerical results, we determined that these schemes provide excellent performance in reducing the number of outgoing packets from the router while meeting various delay requirements.