Analysis of the Suitability of Satellite Communication for Time-Critical IoT Applications in Smart Grid and Medical Grade Networks

Abstract

Satellite networks are seen as having the potential to play an important role in machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT), which in turn is seen as being important to a number of service sectors. However, certain M2M applications have bounded latency requirements that in some cases may be quite stringent. Satellite networks generally have much higher latency than wired networks and therefore may not be able to meet the requirements of all M2M applications. This paper compares the latency requirements of certain time-critical applications with reported satellite network latency and address the problem of latency evaluation of networks to support these types of applications.