Building an Energy Efficient Linear Sensor (EELS) Infrastructure for Smart Cities

In smart cities, a network of various sensors, surveillance devices, and data centers creates a critical infrastructure, which enables civic authorities to render faster and more efficient services. Notably, many deployed sensor applications such as road monitoring (smart lighting, road traffic, pedestrians, etc.), railways (tracking, breaking, etc.) and pipeline sensors (leak, pressure, etc.) form in a linear topology. These linear sensors collect data and report them to a central control station via neighbor sensors. However, relaying data through sensors causes critical energy inefficiency and imbalance issues as well as creates data transmission delay, which provokes complex application and service management hassles. In this paper, we propose an Energy-Efficient Linear Sensor (EELS) Infrastructure for Smart Cities. We design and develop an energy-efficient Wake-up Receiving (WuRx) method on sensor nodes by using a dual-channel, an infrared (IR) based WuRx channel over a Wi-Fi data channel, to enhance the duty cycle efficiency. Besides, we build a pipelined relay algorithm to avoid any network performance (delay) degradation. The experimental results show that IR WuRx EELS performed nine times better energy usage per node and achieved a constant network delay regardless of the number of relaying nodes in the network.