Energy-Efficient Network Protocols for Domestic IoT Application Design
Chrispin Gray, Leith H Campbell, Robert W. A. Ayre, Kerry James Hinton · Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy · 2019
In the future Internet of Things, many common household devices will have communications interfaces added. The gathering of data from these household IoT-enabled devices will incur an energy cost and, in this paper, we investigate the impact of different communications technologies and protocols on that cost. As a first step towards energy-efficient design, we have measured the power consumption of several popular wireless interfaces – Bluetooth (Classic and Low Energy), ZigBee, Wi-Fi and 433 MHz module (RF433). We then combine these measurements through the example of a simple domestic stock control application and we show how an energy-efficient communications paradigm can be designed in each case. In general, both the communications paradigm and the amount of traffic need to be considered for an energy-efficient design. This is a contribution to design guidelines for energy-efficient communication in the Internet of Things as it expands to encompass all consumer devices.