Green Industrial Internet of Things Architecture: An Energy-Efficient Perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) can support collaboration and communication between objects automatically. However, with the increasing number of involved devices, IoT systems may consume substantial amounts of energy. Thus, the relevant energy efficiency issues have recently been attracting much attention from both academia and industry. In this article we adopt an energy-efficient architecture for Industrial IoT (IIoT), which consists of a sense entities domain, RESTful service hosted networks, a cloud server, and user applications. Under this architecture, we focus on the sense entities domain where huge amounts of energy are consumed by a tremendous number of nodes. The proposed framework includes three layers: the sense layer, the gateway layer, and the control layer. This hierarchical framework balances the traffic load and enables a longer lifetime of the whole system. Based on this deployment, a sleep scheduling and wake-up protocol is designed, supporting the prediction of sleep intervals. The shifts of states support the use of the entire system resources in an energy-efficient way. Simulation results demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed architecture in resource utilization and energy consumption.

Introduction

With the rapid development of industrial informatization, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been considered an extremely important and promising component of the future transformation of industrial systems. By leveraging radio-frequency identification (RFID) and more general sensors, industrial plants and equipment may be protected by high quality surveillance and control based on a wide range of wireless and intelligent devices. Industrial loT (IIoT) systems are becoming more complicated with growing scales, which leads to a number of significant challenges that need to be considered, such as increasing energy consumption.