Abstract
The future Internet of Things (IoT) will enable Internet connectivity for a vast amount of battery-powered devices, which usually need to 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 Dual-Interface Dual-Pipeline Scheduling (DIPS) scheme, which leverages an activation pipeline mainly constructed by low-power ZigBee interfaces to wake up a data pipeline constructed by high-power Wi-Fi interfaces on demand, towards enabling multi-hop data delivery in IoT. The objective is to minimize network energy consumption while satisfying certain end-to-end delay requirements. Extensive simulations and prototype-based experiments have been conducted. The results show that the energy consumption of DIPS is 96.5% and 92.8% lower than that of the IEEE 802.11’s standard power saving scheme and a state-of-the-art pipeline-based scheme in moderate traffic scenarios, respectively.
