## 2 Related Work  
In the rapidly evolving landscape of smart cities, the seamless integration of IoT devices has become imperative to enable efficient and reliable communication. Among the various wireless protocols available, the IEEE 802.15.4-based Thread network has emerged as a promising solution for IoT deployments in smart cities. Recently, several studies have been conducted on various aspects of ad hoc networks [15], including the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 networks [16]. Silicon Labs, Austin, TX, USA, has conducted a performance analysis of Thread networking standards through an experimental study in their R&D facility [17]. The analysis evaluated the performance aspects of multi-hop RTT latency for unicast, and multicast end-to-end latency on different ranges of networks. Similarly, performance analysis of a large Thread network was conducted by NXP, which focused on unicast and multicast latency utilizing a precision time protocol, considering latency and RTT using Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets [18]. Silicon Labs also conducted experimental tests on the comparison of Thread, Zigbee, and Bluetooth mesh networking standards, and found that Thread outperformed its peers [19]. All these experimental evaluations mainly relied only on RTT measurements, and the payload size considered was also on a limited scale. Moreover, the performance of the Thread network did not include the varying bitrate. In [20], authors present the performance evaluation of Thread-based commercial lighting systems. They use key performance indicators such as time for complete coverage, end-to-end latency, packet delivery ratio, and synchronization to analyze the impact on the user experience. The authors use unicast and multicast measurement results in typical lighting applications to analyze their impact on the user experience. In [21], a comparison study of Thread mesh with other widely used wireless protocols for IoT devices, including Bluetooth Mesh, ZigBee, NB-IoT, Sigfox, and LoRa, is provided. The comparisons made are without any empirical performance evaluations, instead based on general characteristics. The study analyzes the requirements for wireless connectivity in smart homes, smart cities, and rural areas. Moreover, it considers the usability of these protocols in the Internet of Things, Services, and People (IoTSP) applications. In [22], authors investigated the potential of Thread protocol in industrial applications, with a focus on the smart factory domain of Industry 4.0. A pack predictive scheduling system for smart factories was proposed using Thread protocol. The performance evaluation was performed using the MCU FRDM-KW41Z board, developed by NXP Semiconductors, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. These papers also describe the hardware and software for implementation and use case scenarios; however, they do not provide any performance evaluation statistics. Authors in [23] proposed a theoretical system-level model to investigate the Thread network protocol for Proximity Services in building automation and smart homes. The TA testbed was implemented in a real environment to analyze the latency, and to compare the experimental findings with analytical results. They also did not use any other parameters for performance evaluation and limited their analysis to RTT. In [24], authors demonstrate a new approach of using Thread as a wireless communication protocol, instead of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) platforms and test it in existing vehicles. This approach greatly reduces the power consumption during the wireless transmission of information. This work does not provide any information on the performance evaluation of the Thread network. In [25], a non-NCP (Network Co-Processor) Thread border router was designed and prototyped based on the OpenThread implementation using Linux system. The experimental results in terms of performance evaluation of this work are limited to RTT. Moreover, ref.