Temporal traffic smoothing for IoT traffic in mobile networks

The proportion of mobile-device traffic relative to the total Internet traffic has been increasing as Internet of Things (IoT) devices have spread. Here, if a large number of IoT devices send communication requests to the same base station at the same time, those requests conflict with each other, which results in serious congestion in the cellular network. To solve this problem, researchers have discussed traffic smoothing techniques. However, their work has focused on either temporal offloading or spatial offloading only. When we consider moving IoT devices, delaying their communication requests for temporal offloading might also work as spatial offloading, because the devices might move to other neighboring cells while waiting for their transmission timing. That is, delaying requests contributes to not only temporal but also spatial traffic offloading. On the basis of this principle, we propose a communication timing control for temporal and spatial traffic offloading that works for moving IoT devices in cellular networks. By using our method, part of the excess traffic is moved to off-peak times and neighboring cells. A comparative evaluation proved that our method effectively reduces peak traffic while satisfying latency requirements of IoT applications.