Energy Efficient Data Transmission in IoT Platforms

Internet of Things (IoT) as an emerging technology is of interest to academia and industry. An IoT node is a small device and the supplied power is usually provided by batteries. The collected data by IoT nodes will be transferred to a gateway server which may aggregate data and send it to a cloud platform for further data processing. When IoT nodes distribute through a vast area, nodes located far away from the gateway server will need to transfer data through multi-hops to the gateway server. To have a better power consumption and increase node operational time, next forwarding node can be selected with the highest power level among several candidate nodes. In this paper we propose a data transmission model, and develop a next node selection forwarding factor to balance data transmission throughout the network. The proposed model will consider workload in addition to the available power level to select the next forwarding node. Our simulation results show the selected next forwarding node will operate for a longer time even it has a lower power level compared to the other candidate nodes. This improvement may increase network stability and decrease the number of lost packets during the data transmission.