Impact of WSN applications’ generated traffic on WCDMA access networks

WCDMA radio access networks are dimensioned using traffic models containing traffic characteristics for a number of services offered by the operators and their networks today. Recent trends have seen a new class of traffic emerging, driven by wireless sensor network applications and machine-to-machine communication. This communication between ldquothingsrdquo has traffic characteristics very different from traditional human centric services. As more such services are expected to use mobile network as a backhaul, it is important to understand the impact their traffic will have on the radio access network. This paper provides a first attempt to study the potential capacity impact of several selected sensor based applications on the WCDMA radio access network. In that, we assumed mobile subscribers to be generators of the wireless sensor network and machine-to-machine traffic, in addition to standard traffic that is in use today. The results thus far have shown that bearer mapping can be a deciding factor in determining the size of the network and the required resources.