ERA-ContikiMAC: An adaptive radio duty cycling layer in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is the theory of connecting physical devices of heterogeneous networks via internet that brings global revolution in wireless networks. Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are the main core of Internet of Things technology in which their protocols and standard limitations such as energy, storage and processing power must be carefully considered. Radio Duty Cycling (RDC) layer is placed between Media Access Control (MAC) and physical layer for decreasing energy consumption of networks. ContikiMAC is the best RDC layer protocol that keeps nodes off as much as possible but it should wake them up by a fix RDC frequency to receive packets. In this paper, an Adaptive Radio Duty Cycling layer is proposed in which every node dynamically adjusts its RDC frequency based on its battery capacity level and channel radio activity. The proposed mechanism is called ERA-ContikiMAC (Energy-Rate Algorithm for ContikiMAC). ERA-ContikiMAC is a development of ContikiMAC mechanism that is implemented and simulated in Contiki operating system. The results derived from COOJA simulator compared with the ContikiMAC mechanism and a capacity-based mechanism that uses battery capacity level of node for adjusting RDC frequency for next round. Evaluations were based on the confidence intervals so they showed significant improvement of average energy consumption and radio duty cycle in low traffic networks.