Energy characterization of IoT systems through design aspect monitoring

Abstract

The technological revolution brought by the Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by a high level of automation based, to a large extent, on battery autonomy. Important risks hindering its wide adoption, though, are associated with device battery lifetime, which is affected by system design aspects such as connectivity, data processing and storage, as well as security protection against cyber-threats. Even though simulation can help for the energy cost estimation of IoT applications before their actual deployment, it is still challenging, and extensive effort is required to converge to a feasible architectural deployment scenario. This article introduces a method to address this challenge by estimating the energy cost of the IoT design aspects and identifying the feasible deployment scenarios, for an IoT system architecture. The method is illustrated on a smart city application that consists of subsystems for building management and intelligent transportation. These two subsystems employ a variety of IoT devices connected to an Orion border router. We estimate the feasibility of various architectural deployments with respect to the system requirements and conclude to those that are possible, as feedback to the system designers. The case study results include quantitative metrics for the evaluation of system requirements using a new aspect monitoring technique and the well-established Statistical Model Checking (SMC) approach.