An energy-efficient message scheduling algorithm in Internet of Things environment

Internet of Things (IoT) is regarded as the next big thing for the Internet development. While much work has been focused on the sensors, communication and network aspects of IoT systems, this paper investigates into service provisioning in IoT environment. In particular the paper focuses on message scheduling in an IoT environment where things or sensors are clustered into groups with each group has a message broker that delivers the messages originated from the group to the ultimate receiver of the sensed data. The message scheduler operates on the brokers to decide which message to be transmitted first. While most message scheduling algorithms consider only application-layer features of messages (such as expiry time) the message scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper improve the overall IoT systems efficiency. Furthermore, via routing, energy efficiency has also become a salient feature of the proposed scheduling algorithm. The simulation results have shown the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed message scheduling algorithm both in terms of service response time and energy consumption.