A Machine Learning Regression Approach for Throughput Estimation in an IoT Environment

The success of Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly increased the volume of data generated by various smart applications. However, as many of these applications are characterized by strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, there is a growing need for accurately predicting typical performance parameters such as throughput. This prediction should be based on the applications' traffic profiles and at the same time reflect the network uncertainty that IoT access networks add to the overall communication. In this work, we deployed 6 different smart building applications in a real testbed while creating a considerable traffic contention in an IEEE 802.15.4 access network. After preprocessing the raw data and following a feature engineering mechanism, we apply five different regression learning approaches to each application and predict its throughput. By resorting to several prediction error metrics and time metrics such as training and inference time, we show that the multiple linear regression achieves high accuracy while outperforming other well known machine learning methods.