A renewable energy-aware distributed task scheduler for multi-sensor IoT networks

Abstract

IoT devices are becoming increasingly complex, support multiple sensors and often rely on batteries and renewable energy. Scheduling algorithms can help to manage their energy usage. When multiple devices cooperatively monitor an environment, scheduling sensing tasks across a distributed set of IoT devices can be challenging because they have limited information about other devices, limited energy and communication bandwidth. In addition, sharing information between devices can be costly in terms of energy. Our Tier-based Task scheduling protocol (T2), is an energy efficient distributed scheduler for a network of multi-sensor IoT devices. T2, adapting on an epoch-by-epoch basis distributes task executions throughout an epoch to minimize temporal sensing overlap without exceeding task deadlines. Our experiments show that T2 schedules an IoT device's sensing task start time before its deadline expires. When compared against a simple periodic scheduler, T2 schedules closer to the optimal centralized EDF scheduler.