Energy-Efficient Optimization Layer for Event-Based Communications on Wi-Fi Things

The Web-of-Things or WoT offers a way to standardize the access to services embedded on everyday objects, leveraging on well accepted standards of the Web such as HTTP and REST services. The WoT offers new ways to build mashups of object services, notably in smart buildings composed of sensors and actuators. Many things are now taking advantage of the progresses of embedded systems relying on the ubiquity of Wi-Fi networks following the 802.11 standards. Such things are often battery powered and the question of energy efficiency is therefore critical. In our research, we believe that several optimizations can be applied in the application layer to optimize the energy consumption of things. More specifically in this paper, we propose an hybrid layer automatically selecting the most appropriate communication protocol between current standards of WoT. Our results show that indeed not all protocols are equivalent in terms of energy consumption, and that some noticeable energy saves can be achieved by using our hybrid layer.