An Optimal Preferred Network Offload Scan Framework for Smart Wearable IoT Devices

The recent developments in wireless communication technology have led to the rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The IoT use cases that demand greater bandwidth, robustness, and resilience can now use wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Cellular. The case of wearable devices embedded with advanced wireless communication capabilities is particularly interesting. Such devices are portable and battery-operated sensor devices which can serve several IoT application use-cases. However, these devices have limited energy, so it is vital to save energy of wearable devices. An important aspect is the energy cost incurred during network scanning operations. In this work, we propose an optimized preferred network offload (OPNO) scheme for wearable IoT devices. In particular, we exploit the companion device associated with the wearable devices to design an efficient and low-power network scanning scheme. The scheme's efficiency is justified analytically. We also develop a Raspberry-Pi4 based experimental setup for the same. Finally, we present the energy consumption results for several bands of operation like 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 2.4 + 5 GHz obtained using the experimental setup.