Modeling IoT Traffic Patterns: Insights from a Statistical Analysis of an MTC Dataset

As MTC networks continue to grow rapidly, managing and optimizing resources has become a crucial challenge for ensuring scalability. Additionally, the low-power/complexity of the MTC devices (MTD) present another challenge in terms of data management and network availability. These factors depend on the limited battery lifetime of the devices and their ability to implement algorithms, making energy efficiency and optimization critical enablers for future MTC networks (Shafiq et al., 2020). Characterizing and modeling MTC traffic is crucial for optimizing wireless IoT networks by tailoring management strategies to specific application needs (Sharma & Wang, 2019, 2018). With this, significant energy savings may be achieved, which is crucial due to the limited battery lifespan inherent in IoT networks, thereby improving network efficiency and scalability Shafiq et al. (2020). This may be enabled by the exploitation of accurate machine learning (ML)-based traffic predictors (Kato et al., 2016). For example, idle channel monitoring is responsible for wasting over half of the energy consumed in these networks (Mughees et al., 2020) while the results in (Ruiz-Guirola et al., 2022) indicated that up to 38% of the consumed energy could be saved by exploiting a prediction method when using sleep modes like wake-up radio or discontinuous reception. Unfortunately, the use of ML requires numerous labeled data obtained from extensive, large-scale dataset (Aldahiri et al., 2021). A significant stage of the ML process is the data analysis, which can be a difficult task.