A Universal Testbed for IoT Wireless Technologies: Abstracting Latency, Error Rate and Stability from the IoT...

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Network Performance Measurement

Background:

• IoT applications critically depend on robust wireless communication networks.
• Selecting appropriate wireless IoT technologies requires evaluating technical factors like latency, error rate, and stability.
• Existing methods for measuring these parameters can be technology-specific and complex.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design, develop, and validate a Universal Testbed for measuring wireless IoT communication reliability parameters.
• To abstract performance measurements from specific IoT protocols and hardware platforms.
• To provide an accurate and accessible tool for evaluating different wireless IoT technologies.

Main Methods:

• Developed a Universal Testbed utilizing a Raspberry Pi 4.
• The testbed requires only digital inputs from the IoT device under test.
• Validated accuracy through temporal characterization, measuring accumulated response delay with an error less than 290 µs.

Main Results:

• The Universal Testbed demonstrates high accuracy, with a relative error around 3% for typical IoT wireless technology latencies.
• Successfully validated the testbed's performance by comparing measurements with established values for common IoT technologies.
• Evaluated technologies include 6LoWPAN, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, BLE, and NB-IoT.

Conclusions:

• The Universal Testbed is an effective tool for experimentally measuring key wireless IoT communication reliability parameters.
• The testbed's accuracy and broad applicability facilitate informed decisions in selecting wireless IoT technologies.
• This work contributes a standardized approach to evaluating the performance of diverse IoT communication systems.