Extending Energy Neutral Operation in Internet of Things

The advances made in sustainable energy technology to power small Internet of Things (IoT) devices have raised the challenge of how to prolong the energy neutral operation (ENO), in which no node depletes its battery and all nodes prevent batteries from overcharging. Extending the operational time of IoT networks through environmental friendly sources (e.g., solar, thermal, and vibration ) is the first stage toward energy sustainable communications. However, it is still a challenge to harvest energy from sustainable sources and dynamic control consumption to avoid over- or underutilization. In light of this, optimization approaches should be proposed to achieve and maintain ENO as long as possible. This article sets out an optimization model and a distributed heuristic that is able to achieve and prolong ENO in IoT networks, by supporting periodic and event-based traffic data. In addition, the proposed solutions achieve ENO by controlling the resulting traffic and the transmissions, including the use of data aggregation. The experimental results show the benefits of the distributed heuristic in terms of time in ENO and the amount of event-traffic delivered to the sink node.