On the Benefits of Network-level Cooperation in IoT Networks with Aggregators

In this work, we consider a random access Internet of Things IoT wireless network assisted by two aggregators collecting information from two disjoint groups of sensors. The nodes and the aggregators are transmitting in a random access manner under slotted time, the aggregators perform network-level cooperation for the data collection. The aggregators are equipped with queues to store data packets that are transmitted by the network nodes and relaying them to the destination node. We characterize the throughput performance of the IoT network and we obtain the stability conditions for the queues at the aggregators. We apply the theory of boundary value problems to analyze the delay performance. Our results show that the presence of the aggregators provides significant gains in the IoT network performance, in addition, we provide useful insights regarding the scalability of the IoT network.