Mitigating Adversities in Urban IoT-setup: A Sensor Assisted Approach

Low power communication in the edge of Internet-of-Things (IoT) is significantly influenced by the presence of solid obstacles in the communication path. In urban outdoor environment, big moving vehicles passing through a road can often obstruct communication between IoT-devices installed at the two opposite sides of the road. Due to traffic lights or congestion when the vehicles stop for a short duration, these short-term obstructions can result in a lot of energy wastage due to prolong packet re-transmissions. In this paper we demonstrate the impact of such obstructions through extensive outdoor experiments and measurement studies. We also propose a novel strategy based on low-power off-the-shelf sensors to deal with the problem. Our empirical trace-based simulation study shows that under moderate traffic condition, the proposed sensor-assisted strategy can save 80% - 87% of the energy.