A Model to Estimate the Minimum Data Transmission Time in IoT Networks Using Multiple Fungible Paths

Reports have emerged of the vast amounts of data being transmitted across the Internet by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Amidst this, the number of connected IoT devices continues to grow at a very rapid pace but over the last five years peak internet utilization has remained just under 50%. While applications have been processing increasingly massive amounts of data, users have been demanding faster or more acceptable response times and others have touted the economic value of having faster response times. In this paper we proffer arguments for adding more fungible paths to IoT and other smart devices to obtain theoretical speedup in network data transmission, and we present equations to compute the number of fungible paths needed to complete transmission of a set amount of data in a specific required minimum time frame, and the resulting speedup achieved. Our proposed model can assist IoT and smart device manufacturers, network administrators, and networked applications developers in deciding how many physical and logical layer one communication units to build into the devices they manufacture, and how many of these communication paths should be utilized during a communication session to achieve the desired data transfer/response times.