Quality-Based and Energy-Efficient Data Communication for the Internet of Things Networks

Large volumes of real-world observation and measurement data are collected from sensory devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. IoT data is often generated in highly distributed and dynamic environments. Continuous transmission of large volumes of data collected between sensor and head/sink nodes induces a high communication cost for individual nodes. This results in a significant increase in the overall energy cost for IoT applications such as environmental monitoring. Decreasing data transmission between nodes can effectively reduce energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime, especially in battery-powered nodes/networks. In this article, we describe an adaptive method for data reduction (AM-DR), a data reduction approach for reducing the overall data transmission and communication between sensor nodes in IoT networks such that fine-grained sensor readings can be used to reconstruct the original data within a user-defined accuracy boundary. Evaluation with real-world data shows that AM-DR achieves a communication reduction in some scenarios up to 95% while retaining a high prediction accuracy. To fully achieve the energy savings enabled by AM-DR, we provide a communication cost model. The proposed model is also integrated into the LEACH protocol to demonstrate how our proposed approach reduces energy consumption and effectively prolongs the network lifetime.