An Advanced Energy Management and Harvesting System for Network Lifetime for Industrial IoT in Smart Cities

In smart cities, managing the energy in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) IoT networks is a challenging issue. In a cluster-based IIoT, cluster heads (CHs) near the sink quickly deplete their energy as they are responsible for relaying a large amount of data. It results in isolating the sink from the network and causes an energy hole or hot spot problem. Many solutions exist for this problem, including sink mobility, unequal clustering, use of gateways, etc. Each of these solutions has its own merits and demerits. It is well known that combining clustering and energy-aware routing can significantly extend the IIoT’s lifetime. In this work, we propose an advanced energy management and harvesting system for enhancement of network lifetime of IIoT in smart cities by addressing the hot spot problems. The system is based on energy-aware clustering and routing algorithms that employ energy-harvesting nodes deployed along with the normal sensor nodes. We simulate the proposed system extensively for various cases of network topology. A couple of existing algorithms are analyzed and compared with simulated results. It is shown that the network lifetime is increased significantly compared to the existing ones.