Edge-Assisted Stream Scheduling Scheme for the Green-Communication-Based IoT

The consumer Internet of Things (IoT), which exploits wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology, is undergoing rapid growth. Although the consumer IoT enables users to control many devices and offers conveniences and benefits for daily life, its long-term operation capabilities are subject to a bottleneck related to power management. To save energy and prolong the lifetime of an IoT system, the basic idea is to allow idle devices to go to sleep. Because excessively frequent switching between the awake and asleep phases will consume a significant amount of power, it is essential to properly schedule the order of multiple communication streams among multiple devices such that the total number of wake-up events is as small as possible. Based on the typical communication protocols deployed in IoT systems, this problem can be divided into two cases: 1) the intersuperframe case and the 2) intrasuperframe case. The former case has been well studied in existing works, whereas research on the latter case is currently immature. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme for addressing the stream order scheduling (SOS) problem in the intrasuperframe case. Mobile edge computing technology is utilized in the proposed scheme to reduce the network load, and three heuristic algorithms are proposed to improve the scheme's performance. We report various tests conducted on 4800 random original IoT topologies and 19000 random Hamiltonian edge-dual topologies, and the experimental results demonstrate that our scheme achieves optimal solutions with a very high success probability.