A Case Study on Energy Overhead of Different IoT Network Stacks

Due to the limited energy budget for sensor nodes in the Internet of Things (IoT), it is crucial to develop energy efficient communications amongst others. This need leads to the development of various energy-efficient protocols that consider different aspects of the energy status of a node. However, a single protocol covers only one part of the whole stack and savings on one level might not be as efficient for the overall system, if other levels are considered as well. In this paper, we analyze the energy required for an end device to maintain connectivity to the network as well as perform application specific tasks. By integrating the complete stack perspective, we build a more holistic view on the energy consumption and overhead for a wireless sensor node. For better understanding, we compare three different stack variants in a base scenario and add an extended study to evaluate the impact of retransmissions as a robustness mechanism. Our results show, that the overhead introduced by the complete stack has an significant impact on the nodes energy consumption especially if retransmissions are required.