Performance of LTE uplink for IoT backhaul

The number of devices connected to the Internet is growing substantially as a result of increased realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. As cellular networks can already be perceived almost as ubiquitous, they can potentially provide IoT systems access to the Internet regardless of their location. However, increased use of commercial cellular networks to provide connectivity for IoT systems would also change the traffic mix of these networks. It has been measured earlier that a large number of small packets are challenging for different wireless access networks to provide high performance. Currently, small packets are transmitted, for example, with Voice over IP (VoIP) services. Many IoT applications, being based on constrained sensor devices and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) type of communications, can increase the number of small packets significantly. In this paper, we measure the performance of Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink as a backhaul for IoT networks. We experiment with differently sized packets in order to find optimal packet sizes that can result in maximum utilization of available resources in the LTE air interface. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to thoroughly evaluate LTE uplink performance with different packet sizes based on empirical evidence. The results indicate that with very small packets the throughput performance is less than half from that obtained with large packets. As an application to exploit the achieved results, we propose IoT gateway solutions to perform packet aggregation at mobile edge to maximize resource utilization in the air interface.