A reconfigurable IoT architecture with energy efficient event-based data traffic reduction scheme

Abstract

Designing an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled environment requires integration of various things/devices. Integrating these devices require a generalized approach as these devices can have different communication protocols. In this paper, we have proposed generalized nodes for connecting various devices. These nodes are capable of creating a scalable local wireless network that connects to the cloud through a network gateway. The nodes also support over the air programming to re-configure the network from the cloud. As number of devices connected to the cloud increases, the network traffic also increases. In order to reduce the network traffic we have used different data transfer schemes for the network. We have also proposed an event-based data transfer scheme for situations where there is low probability of change in sensor value. The experimental results shows that the event-based scheme reduces the data traffic by up to 48% under practical conditions without any loss of information compared to priority based data transfer. We have also shown that the proposed scheme is more reliable for data transfer in a large network with a success rate of 99.5% measured over 200 minutes for 1201 data packets.