Power Saving Scheme by Distinguishing Traffic Patterns for Event-Driven IoT Applications

Many Internet of Things (IoT) applications involving bursty traffic have emerged recently with event detection. A power management scheme qualified for uplink bursty traffic (PM-UBT) is proposed by distinguishing between bursty and general uplink traffic patterns in the IEEE 802.11 standard to balance energy consumption and uplink latency, especially for stations with limited power and constrained buffer size. The proposed PM-UBT allows a station to transmit an uplink bursty frame immediately regardless of the state. Only when the sleep timer expires can the station send uplink general traffic and receive all downlink frames from the access point. The optimization problem (OP) for PM-UBT is power consumption minimization under a constrained buffer size at the station. This OP can be solved effectively by the bisection method, which demonstrates a performance similar to that of exhaustive search but with less computational complexity. Simulation results show that when the frame arrival rate in a station is between 5 and 100 frame/second, PM-UBT can save approximately 5 mW to 30 mW of power compared with an existing power management scheme. Therefore, the proposed power management strategy can be used efficiently for delay-intolerant uplink traffic in event-driven IoT applications, such as health status monitoring and environmental surveillance.