An energy efficient long hop (LH) first scheduling algorithm for scalable Internet of Things (IoT) networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more and more pervasive in everyday life and connecting an array of diverse physical objects. It is fast growing and receiving a tremendous amount of research focus. Billions of objects communicate each other with or without human intervention to achieve smart applications. Most of the connected devices are constrained nodes to its ecosystem which have limited memories, CPU capabilities and power sources. Therefore, for implementing autonomous smart systems, efficient energy consumption is imperative. This paper introduces a novel scheduling algorithm called Long Hop (LH) first to optimize energy usage on a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that enables IoT system. LH algorithm schedules high priority for packets coming with more hops and longer distances to be served first at the cluster head (CH) nodes of the WSN. Since these packets require more links and nodes (thus increased energy and bandwidth usage) to reach the ultimate destination if not prioritized, the proposed algorithm reduces the overall energy usage and minimizes the total number of packets re-transmission and the effective data transmission distances. This improves the overall system performance and elongates the network lifetime.

I. Introduction

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are spatially distributed autonomous sensors in a sensing field to monitor specific phenomenons and collect data [1]. WSN is one of the key enabling technologies for the IoT system. IoT is essentially all possible devices connected to the internet that will enable applications to be smart by sensing, harnessing data, making decisions and acting on it, mostly without human interventions [2]. IoT devices are growing at an exponential pace with wearable devices, kitchen appliances, connected cars, healthcare devices, etc becoming more and more commonplace [3].