A cross-interface design for energy-efficient and delay-bounded multi-hop communications in IoT

The future Internet of Things (IoT) will enable Internet connectivity for a vast amount of battery-powered devices, which usually need to wirelessly communicate with each other or to some remote gateways through multi-hop communications. Although ZigBee has become a widely used communication technology in IoT, Wi-Fi, on the other hand, has its unique advantages such as high throughput and native IP compatibility, despite its potentially higher energy consumption. With the development of IoT, more and more IoT devices are equipped with multiple radio interfaces, such as both Wi-Fi and ZigBee. Inspired by this, we propose a cross-interface power saving management (CPSM) scheme, which leverages the existing low-power ZigBee interfaces to wake up the high-power Wi-Fi interfaces on demand towards enabling multi-hop communications in IoT. The objective is to minimize the network energy consumption while satisfying certain end-to-end delay requirements. The results of extensive simulations and prototype-based experiments have demonstrated that the energy consumption of our proposed CPSM is 79.2% and 68.9% lower than those of the IEEE 802.11's standard power saving scheme and a state-of-the-art scheme in moderate traffic scenarios, respectively.