Minimizing Energy Consumption with Devices Placement and Scheduling in Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm which makes billions of IoT devices integrate to the Internet, and enables them to gather and exchange information. The Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, such as LoRa, SigFox, NB-IoT, bring new renovation to the wireless communication between end devices in the IoTs, which can provide larger coverage and support a large number of IoT devices to connect Internet with few gateways. Based on these technologies, we can directly deploy IoT devices on the candidate locations to cover targets without considering multi-hops data transmission to the base station like the traditional wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of the Minimum Energy consumption of IoT devices through Placement and Scheduling (MEPS), where we consider both the placement and scheduling of IoT devices to monitor all targets such that all targets are continuously observed for a certain period of time. The objective of the problem is to minimize the total energy consumption of the IoT devices. We first propose the mathematical model for the MEPS problem and prove that the MEPS problem is NP-hard. Then we study two sub-problems of the MEPS problem, Minimum Location Coverage (MLC) and Minimum Energy consumption Scheduling Deployment (MESD), and propose an approximation algorithm for each of them. Based on these two sub-problems, we propose an approximation algorithm with the approximation ratio \(2(\ln m+1)\) for the MEPS problem, where m is the number of targets.