EnergIoT: A solution to improve network lifetime of IoT devices

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm attracting significant attention in the modern wireless telecommunications field. However, in some scenarios, the performance of IoT network is limited by energy-constrained devices. In order to improve the energy efficiency of such IoT devices, researchers have proposed several approaches based on duty cycle operation (switching devices between sleeping and active mode). However, current solutions adopting duty cycle (i.e., the fraction of time in which a node is active) have three issues: (i) they assign the same duty cycle ratio to all the nodes without balancing energy consumption; or (ii) they distribute different duty cycle ratios without considering the energy consumption during network construction phase; or (iii) their network structure models are based on concentric corona, instead of clustering structure.In this paper, we propose EnergIoT, a hierarchical clustering approach based on duty cycle ratio to maximize network lifetime of battery-powered IoT devices. In particular, we assign different duty cycle ratios to devices according to their distance from the sink, since different duty cycle ratios balance the energy consumption among devices at different layers. Furthermore, we calculate the energy consumption of IoT devices, considering both network construction phase and data processing phase. We evaluate EnergIoT through extensive simulation analyses on the OMNet++ platform. The result shows that EnergIoT is not only feasible but also efficient. Moreover, EnergIoT improves the network lifetime by 32%, compared to the uniform duty cycle approach, without sacrificing the network performance (i.e., end-to-end delay).