Optimized Flow Assignment in a Multi-Interface IoT Gateway

The last few years have witnessed a significant increase in the deployment of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) networks. IoT devices send data with different requirements such as tolerated delay and data rates. Emerging multi-interface IoT devices bring the flexibility of connecting to multiple heterogeneous access networks, which thus improves the network capacity. However, each network interface has its own constraints in terms of network coverage, capacity, packet loss rates, etc. An efficient utilization of the available multiple interfaces in IoT gateways would improve the network performance. Therefore, it is crucial to design a flow assignment mechanism to select the appropriate interface that best satisfies the flow's requirements and maximizes the amount of data accepted by an IoT gateway. In this work, we model and formulate the optimized flow assignment problem (OFAP) in a multi-interface IoT gateway. Then, we develop two heuristic algorithms to find a feasible solution for OFAP. The first algorithm is based on the greedy approach and the second uses dynamic programming to assign flows to interfaces. We provide simulation results that show the effectiveness of our algorithms.