A Distributed Approach to Energy Efficiency in Seamless IoT Communications

The rapid growth of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices modernizes our society and lives. Such a growth leads to the pro-liferation of the wireless technologies, most of which occupy the unlicensed/open industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands. Since each of these wireless technologies adheres to different standards, they give rise to challenges like cross technology interference, incompatible security protocols and high energy consumption. In this work, we envision to achieve an energy-efficient communication on a seamless IoT platform. In specific, a game theoretical approach is proposed to formulate a multi-device IoT communication system. The existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium is proven to achieve the optimal transmit power for the IoT devices. Moreover, a distributed scheme is developed for practical implementations depending on receiving signal strength indicators. Simulation results demonstrate that optimal transmit power can be achieved through the proposed scheme. We further implement and demonstrate the distributed approach on a universal software radio peripheral (USRP) testbed.