Towards High Energy Efficiency in the Internet of Things

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) protocols provide the fundamental mechanisms to collect data from low power devices and lossy networks. IoT protocols collect data blocks from the devices in messages that have one header and a single payload, regardless the size of the payload. This paper presents a solution to collect small size data blocks from low power devices in an efficient way, carrying these data blocks in the payload of a single message. Current solutions do not offer manners to gather many small blocks of data and reduce the overhead of the communication. The proposed solution is a light-weight layer designed to operate with the standard IoT protocol stack aiming to reduce the energy consumption of the energy constrained devices without lowering the data accuracy. The proposed solution was developed in Contiki devices and the measurements conducted on a testbed showed up to 14% energy savings.