Energy efficient event-based networking for the Internet of Things
Panayiotis Kolios, Georgios Ellinas, Christos G. Panayiotou, Marios M. Polycarpou · 2016
Autonomy is a key feature for sustainable operation of the Internet of Things (IoT), since the large deployment scale of IoT devices makes management a very challenging task. For that reason, energy efficiency has become a primary design consideration in emerging and future IoT solutions. Already, beaconing and discontinuous transmission/reception is included in the upcoming IoT standards to enable devices to duty cycle between the active and sleep states in order to save energy. In many cases however, this periodic mode of operation results in unnecessary wake-ups that greatly reduce energy efficiency. Event-based communication greatly outperforms periodic triggering in efficiency, since wake-ups occur only when particular events take place. The networking aspects of this promising approach are investigated herein with devices exchanging events for monitoring and control purposes. Both centralized optimal and distributed heuristic strategies are formulated to intelligently adjust the number of wake-up events in order to maximize energy efficiency. Extensive simulations are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed strategies.