Application Domain-Based Overview of IoT Network Traffic Characteristics

Over the past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has advanced rapidly. New technologies have been proposed and existing approaches optimised to meet user, society and industry requirements. However, as the complexity and heterogeneity of the traffic that flows through the networks are continuously growing, the innovation becomes difficult to achieve in both IoT and legacy networks. This article provides an overview of IoT application domains from a traffic characteristics perspective. Specifically, it identifies several groups of major IoT application use cases and discusses the exhibited traffic characteristics, used network technologies for implementation, and their feasibility as well as challenges. We stress that a key factor in future IoT development is network technologies and the way they handle and forward network traffic. The traffic characteristics emerging from this work can serve as a basis for future design proposals to develop more efficient solutions and improve the network technologies.