of involved devices with sensing, processing, and
Green Industrial
Internet of Things Architecture:
An Energy-Efficient Perspective
The authors focus on the sense entities domain where huge amounts of energy are consumed by
a tremendous number of nodes. The proposed framework includes three layers: the sense layer,
the gateway layer, and the control layer. This hierarchical framework balances the traffic load and skeleton to tackle the flexibility and extendibility
enable a longer lifetime of the whole system.
Kun Wang, Yihui Wang, Yanfei Sun, Song Guo, and Jinsong Wu
Kun Wang, Yihui Wang, and
Yanfei Sun are with Nanjing
University of Posts and
Telecommunications. The
corresponding author is
Yanfei Sun.
Song Guo is with The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University.
Jinsong Wu is with the
Universidad de Chile.
Digital Object Identifier:
10.1109/MCOM.2016.1600399CM
48 0163-6804/16/$25.00 © 2016 IEEE
A bstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) can support col-
laboration and communication between objects
automatically. However, with the increasing num-
ber of involved devices, IoT systems may con-
sume substantial amounts of energy. Thus, the
relevant energy efficiency issues have recently
been attracting much attention from both aca-
demia and industry. In this article we adopt an
energy-efficient architecture for
Industrial IoT (IIoT), which con- COMMUNICATIONS and the ad hoc deployment
sists of a sense entities domain,
RESTful service hosted networks,
a cloud server, and user applica-
ST A N D A R DS
tions. Under this architecture, we focus on the
sense entities domain where huge amounts of
energy are consumed by a tremendous num-
ber of nodes. The proposed framework includes
three layers: the sense layer, the gateway layer,
and the control layer. This hierarchical framework
balances the traffic load and enables a longer life-
time of the whole system. Based on this deploy-
ment, a sleep scheduling and wake-up protocol
is designed, supporting the prediction of sleep
intervals. The shifts of states support the use of
the entire system resources in an energy-efficient
way. Simulation results demonstrate the signifi-
cant advantages of our proposed architecture in
resource utilization and energy consumption.
I ntroduction
With the rapid development of industrial infor-
matization, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been
considered an extremely important and promis-
ing component of the future transformation of
industrial systems. By leveraging radio-frequency
identification (RFID) and more general sensors,
industrial plants and equipment may be protected
by high quality surveillance and control based on
a wide range of wireless and intelligent devices. many factors that we will discuss later. The wake
Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems are becoming more
complicated with growing scales, which leads to a
number of significant challenges that need to be
considered, such as increasing energy consumption. are summarized as follows:
In the early stages, one of the purposes to
adopt IIoT was to reduce resource consumption
and carbon emissions of industrial systems. How-
ever, IIoT systems themselves, including a diversity
IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
communications capabilities, consume substantial
amounts of energy and lead to an increasing car-
bon footprint. On the other hand, IIoT systems
typically consist of low-power devices support-
ed by batteries, which constrains the continuous
operations of IIoT systems.
Recently, various challenging issues in IoT
systems have been investigated. The authors in
[1] proposed an architecture that addresses the
heterogeneity and inter-operability in IoT. The
authors in [2] proposed a conceptual system
issues. More recent advances in green IoT can be
found in [3]. In this article, we adopt an architec-
ture for energy-efficient IIoT, which is comprised
of a sense entities domain, RESTful service hosted
networks, a cloud server, and user applications [4].
Further, energy efficient mechanisms are pro-
posed in the sense entities domain that conform
to the system architecture.
In the IIoT domain, data collection rely heavily
on the massive sensor nodes and smart devices.
Thus, optimizing sensing, processing, and commu-
nications for IoT devices may effectively reduce
energy consumption [5]. Being the backbone of
IIoT systems, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are
the main source of energy consumption. There
are four types of topological structures for the
deployment of large scale WSNs: mesh, plane,
hierarchical, and hybrid. Both the exact deploy-
ment scheme for mesh WSNs
scheme for plane WSNs suffer
from limited overall lifetime. The
scheme for hierarchical WSNs,
which places nodes in a tiered framework and
limits communications among sensor nodes, can
improve routing efficiency dramatically and make
the network more scalable and extensible. The
hierarchy schemes for hybrid WSNs deploy nodes
in tiered ways even when direct communication
among sensor nodes is available, which also limits
the overall lifetime. In this article we adopt hierar-
chical deployment and present a three-layer archi-
tecture for the deployment of nodes and devices
in the sense entities domain. By distinguishing
nodes as sense nodes, gateway nodes, and con-
trol nodes, the traffic loads can be balanced, and
thus network lifetimes may be prolonged. Our
architecture differs from those in previous studies,
since a link traffic balance constraint is proposed
in order to reduce excessive energy consumption.
Based on the proposed three-layer framework,
we improve energy efficiency by proposing a novel
sleep scheduling protocol, in which the prediction
of sleep intervals is first taken into consideration.
The objective of the protocol is to switch some
nodes to sleep mode when the nodes are not in
working state and wake them up when required.
The sleep interval of the nodes is impacted by
up protocol is presented correspondingly and the
reprovision of resources is also mentioned.
Contributions: The contributions of our paper
• A system model for energy-efficient IIoT is
adopted, which consists of a sense entities
domain, RESTful service hosted networks, a
cloud server, and user applications.
• In the sense entities domain, we design a
three-layer hierarchical framework to realize
the deployment of nodes in IIoT, achieving
the goal of saving energy and increasing net-
work lifetimes.
• Based on the aforementioned architecture,
we develop an activity scheduling mecha-
nism to switch nodes to sleep mode and
wake them up when required based on the
calculation of sleep interval.
The remainder of our article is organized as fol-
lows. We describe the system model developed
for energy-efficient IIoT. We present the three-lay-
er framework for the deployment of nodes in the
proposed model. We demonstrate the activity
scheduling and wake up mechanism on the basis
of the predicted sleep intervals. We demonstrate
the experimental results and conclude this paper.
Energy-Efficient IIoT Architecture
The overall architecture toward energy-efficient
IIoT is illustrated in Fig. 1, which is comprised of
a sense entities domain, RESTful service hosted
networks, a cloud server, and user applications.
Smart devices and nodes are deployed in the
sense entities domain. To further optimize energy
savings, they are classified into sense nodes (SNs),
gateway nodes (GNs), and control nodes (CNs).
The network hosts RESTful web services and con-
nects the sense entities with the cloud server. The
cloud server virtualizes objects, which then are
transferred to the server applications. Processing
and computation for the extracted data from the
sense entities domain are also made on the cloud
server. The application server interface assists
the client to communicate with application serv-
er without access to the server side codes, while
direct access can be made by the administration
(admin) node.
Sense Entities
IIoT networks involve sensor nodes and smart
devices that are Internet Protocol (IP) enabled
and RFID attached. Compared with smart
devices, sensor nodes have strict energy con-
straints due to their dependence upon batteries.
Although there are differences between their
capabilities in terms of memory and processing,
for the convenience of discussion and without
loss of generality, we omit these differences.
We adopt a novel deployment for these nodes
targeting the energy efficiency issue, which will
be discussed later. SNs collect the desired infor-
mation data from their interested area and send
them to GNs. Then GNs store the data in buf-
fer and forward them to CNs. Also, GNs run a
protocol to calculate the sleep intervals of SNs,
which will be discussed in a later section. CNs
work as the manager to allocate resources under
them and redirect the aggregated data to the
networks. Allocation of SNs to specific GNs is
also decided by the CNs.
RESTful Service Hosted Networks
Nowadays, REST methodology has been con-
sidered [6] in many IIoT proposals, since it
makes the integration and accessibility of the
heterogeneous devices easier and more conve-
nient. Thus, our network hosts a RESTful service
where functionalities and data are regarded
IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
Virtual
environment
Application
Application
server
OS
Hypervisor
Interface
Cloud server
Constrained
RESTful
environment
Client
Networks
CN
Admin
GN
SN SN
Sense entities
Figure 1. Energy-efficient IIoT architecture.
as resources that are able to be accessed with
uniform resource identifiers. For resource-con-
strained environments, this RESTful service
makes the applications lightweight, simple, and
fast [7]. Our proposed RESTful service networks
may serve as a bridge between physical sense
entities and virtual objects. They receive the
specification data from the sense entities side,
such as product ID, device IP address, or device
features, and notify the cloud sever to create
the virtual objects with the semantic description
of the sense entities.
Cloud Server
In our energy-efficient IIoT architecture, the cloud
server includes the following two components.
Virtual Environment: Physical things, included
in the sense entities domain, are virtualized for
service lookup in the virtual environment. Then
the virtual objects are hosted and composited as
applications performed inside the virtual machine.
Processing capabilities are also enhanced in
this way. In addition, the virtual environment is
responsible for meshing up diverse objects to ini-
tiate composite ones, which are made regarding the
system situations or service requests from the users.
Further processing and computation of data
is also made in the virtual environment. The data
harvested by SNs are in large volumes and raw
form. Thus, it is necessary to store, compute, and
analyze them and extract interpretable informa-
tion. The virtual environment uses storage and
49
 analytical technologies with the aid of the cloud
In our proposed computing platform.
Application Server and Interface: The applica-
system architecture, tion server allows SNs to communicate with the
we focus on the sense client through the interface or via direct access
from the admin. The registry is made by tracking
entities domain where the services and physical entities that are available
within the entire IoT. Thus, activities in both the
intelligent collections physical and virtual environments can be moni-
of monitored data in tored, and notification will be sent to the autho-
rized user.
IIoT systems are made The server interface works as a protection of
via massive nodes. the sever, preventing direct access from the cli-
ent application. This keeps the server code trans-
Thus, optimizing their parent to the client, preventing unnecessary and
potentially dangerous release of the code. How-
sensing, processing, ever, the admin is allowed direct access to the
and communications server in order to make necessary modifications.
This is also the interface that provides visualization
can efficiently reduce of the processed data derived from the raw data
energy consumptions. collected by SNs.
User Applications
Working as client side applications, the user appli-
cations can be classified into the following two
categories according to the authentication mech-
anisms.
Client Applications: To use virtual objects host-
ed as applications in the virtual environment, the
client uses application interface to send requests
to the server. Direct access is not allowed within
this authentication.
Admin Applications: Unlike the client applica-
tion, an admin application has the right to access
the server directly. Then the admin can promptly
make necessary modifications to the system and
monitor the performance of the whole system.
Three-Layer Framework of the
Sense Entities Domain
Design Goals
In our proposed system architecture, we focus
on the sense entities domain where intelligent
collections of monitored data in IIoT systems
are made via massive nodes. Thus, optimizing
their sensing, processing, and communications
can efficiently reduce energy consumption. As
the backbone of IIoT systems, WSNs can be
a reference when things are deployed in IIoT.
However, compared with WSNs, IIoT achieves
a larger scale and involves much more het-
erogeneous devices, which in return calls for
efficient and effective information collection,
processing, and communication approaches.
To address the mentioned problems, in this
paper we follow the hierarchical deployment
and arrange nodes in a three-layer approach in
the sense entities domain for the deployment
of nodes in the IIoT based on our proposed
architecture.
Three-Layer Framework
We place nodes involved in the IIoT in a hierarchi-
cal style with static routing configuration, avoiding
a complex routing protocol as suggested in [8].
The three layers of our architecture are illustrated
in Fig. 2, i.e., from bottom to top, the sense layer,
the gateway layer, and the control layer.
Sense Layer: Nodes to collect the desired
50 IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
Control node
Control
layer
Gateway
nodes
Gateway
layer
Sensor
Sense
layer
RFID
Phone
Camera
Figure 2. Three-layer architecture of sensing entities
domain.
information from the interested area are placed
in the sense layer. Being responsible for data
collection, a SN senses the target environ-
ment and sends information to a GN. The SNs
are classified into trigger-based and periodic,
according to the data collection and transmis-
sion frequency that are specified by a certain
application. The former transmit data only when
a particular event occurs. Otherwise, they just
wait. However, periodic nodes collect and
transmit information on the arrival of a query at
regular intervals. Both types collect data in their
buffers and transmit data via their communica-
tion hardware.
Unlike sense nodes in other deployment
schemes, we pursue the goal of saving energy
and balancing traffic loads. Thus, in our deploy-
ment, direct communications between SNs are
not allowed and must take GNs as relay nodes. A
SN only sends the acquired data to and receives
packets from its upper GN. For this, nodes in
IIoT are not necessary to implement sophisticat-
ed hardware or run complicated routing mech-
anisms, thus reducing computational complexity
and system cost.
Gateway Layer: The gateway layer is a col-
lection of nodes with relatively high processing
capabilities to run a relatively complicated routing
protocol and thus work as the state managers for
the lower SNs. GNs also serve as relays to for-
ward the data harvested by their SNs to the cloud
server through CNs for further computation and
processing. In the scenario discussed in the next
section, a GN can calculate the sleep intervals of
the SNs connected to it. There is no constraint on
communications between two GNs.
Control Layer: In the control layer, there are
CNs that serve as the manager of GNs. In addi-
tion to transmitting data harvested by SNs to the
cloud server and fetching required information
from the upper layer, CNs decide the allocation
of SNs to GNs based on many factors that will be
discussed later.
Communication Mechanism
Based on the aforementioned architecture, we
propose the communication mechanism for any
two nodes. First, we formulate the communica-
tion scenario as follows. Let m and n be two
nodes in the system and S be the set of SNs.
Also denote G and C as the collection of GNs
and CNs. Let r be the communication radius of
each node and d(m, n) as the distance between
m and n. The communication mechanism can be
outlined as follows:
1. For any m  S,n  S, communications
between m and n are not allowed.
2. For any m  S,n  G, if d(m, n)  r, the data
transmission process between m and n can
be made.
3. For any m  G,n  G  C, if d(m, n)  r, m
and n can reach each other.
System Deployment Constraints
In such a hierarchical system, we provide two
constraints when deploying energy-efficient IIoT.
Based on our architecture and the constraints, a
comprehensive optimization of the deployment
of IIoT can be achieved.
Energy Consumption Constraint: The ener-
gy consumption in data communication is much
higher than in data sensing and processing in IIoT.
Thus, for discussion simplicity, in our architecture
we only consider energy required for transmit-
ting and receiving data. According to the Friis free
space model [9], the energy consumption for a
node to transmit information is affected by the
length of the data, the energy consumption of
radio electronics, and the distance between the
source and destination nodes. The energy con-
sumption of radio electronics also determines that
for receiving data. Based on this analysis and the
communication mechanism described above, the
energy expenditure of each node in the sense
layer, the gateway layer, and the control layer can
be calculated [10].
In particular, the receiving energy consump-
tion of a SN can be omitted based on the fact
that it only receives signal messages that are com-
parably small.
Link Traffic Balance Constraint: In our archi-
tecture, CNs serve as the manager of GNs as
well as the “wired” bridge between sense enti-
ties and cloud server. Thus, they have more
bandwidth than SNs and GNs and the band-
width is not constrained at CNs. However, the
wireless linked GNs must satisfy some require-
ments. For a GN that communicates not only
with SNs in the bottom layer but also the neigh-
boring GNs, the link must ensure that the sum-
mation of the transmitting and receiving data
rates are under the maximum rate threshold.
However, a SN and a CN with a single transmit-
ting or receiving function only need to guaran-
tee that the data rate of this function process
is under the maximum. With GNs of relative-
ly strong performance upon the SNs, they are
responsible for most of the traffic loads. Thus,
link flows balance can be achieved in this
three-layer approach.
IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
Sleep Scheduling and Wake Up Protocol The application server
Protocol Overview allows SNs to commu-
In our proposed architecture, the sense entities nicate with the client
domain is comprised of battery-powered nodes,
which are responsible for energy-consuming data through the interface
processing and communications. We improve the or the direct access
energy efficiency via sleep scheduling, of which
the objective is to switch some nodes to sleep from the admin. The
mode during their inactive periods and wake
them up when required. Unlike what has been registry is made via
done in other works, we make the sleep interval tracking the services
predictable according to the usage history and
remaining battery level of the nodes. The pre- and physical entities
dicted value in return boosts the utilization of all that are available
the resources in IIoT via reprovisioning the allo-
cated resources to other nodes in active mode. within the whole IoT.
Although the authors in [11] proposed a method
to improve energy efficiency by prolonging the Thus, activities in both
sleep period of nodes, the mechanism to predict physical and virtual
the sleep interval of a node was not available.
environment can be
Sense Nodes
On the side of a SN, it is said to be “active”
monitored and notifica-
when it is of high energy, sensing and transmit- tion will be sent to the
ting data to a GN. When turning off its transceiv-
ers, it switches to a low-energy state called sleep authorized user.
mode and stays in sleep mode until a wake-up
signal sent by the GN is received. A SN can be
switched off for a long duration of time when it
is not necessary to sense the target environment.
There are three situations in which a GN sends a
wake-up signal. Two of them are when the sleep
interval has expired and a query arrives. In these
cases, the SN again senses the environment to fill
its buffer. The third case is when a communica-
tion request is made by another SN, and the SN
receives the incoming data into its buffer. After
the completion of this action, it switches back to
the sleep mode. Thus, battery power can be used
efficiently.
Gateway Nodes
Serving as storage media for the sensed data from
SNs and the controller of the connected SNs,
GNs are the major contributors toward energy
saving. The sleep interval of a SN collected to a
GN can be calculated in two steps [12]. First, the
GN obtains a predicted value based on the previ-
ous usage history of SN. Second, the actual sleep
interval is calculated on the basis of the predicted
value and other various factors.
Predicted and Actual Sleep Intervals: Let tin be
the predicted value and Tin be the actual value of
the nth sleep interval of SNi. The GN obtains tin+1
by using the exponential average of the previous
sleep intervals. Then the actual sleep interval can
be calculated by adding a factor rti to rtin+1.
In calculating the predicted sleep interval,
there involves both the past history in t in and
the latest information in Tin. The initial value t0 is
constant and based on each application.  is a
controlling parameter that determines the relative
weight of the present and the past. When  = 1,
this indicates the next sleep interval is just the
last interval. When  = 0, this indicates the most
recent scenario poses no effect on the next sleep
interval. It is the node type that determines the
value of . For a trigger-based node, the value
51

D
SN1 SN2
Overlap
area
r the nonoccurrence of the trigger event in
Figure 3. SNs’ coverage area overlaps.
Noncritical
Sleep interval A query Communication
expires? No reaching? No request?
Yes Yes Critical
Send a
wake-up
signal
Figure 4. Wake up mechanism.
is close to 0, since the occurrence time of the
trigger event is based on past experiences. For a
periodic node, the value is close to 0.5, providing
that the present and past scenarios are consid-
ered equally important. Then calculating the actu-
al sleep interval, there is a factor rTi indicating
the change of sleep interval. Whether the value
is zero, positive, or negative depends on various
factors for the node type.
Factor r T i in Two Node Types: The r T i is
affected by the factors varying with the node type.
Periodic nodes:
• Conflict factor (i): There is a possibility that
the coverage area of nodes may overlap,
as shown in Fig. 3. Thus  i calculates the
amount of SNi’s overlapped region using r
and Dij, where r represents the coverage of
SN and Dij stands for the distance between
SNi and SNj.
• Battery level (Ei): With a high battery level, an
SN can have a short sleep interval. On the
other hand, a longer sleep interval comes
with a decrease in battery level for energy
efficiency.
• Coefficient of variation (CoV): The changes
between the previously and currently sensed
values are monitored by GNs. If a notable
variation is detected, the sleep interval will
be decreased to allow SNs to collect infor-
52 IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
mation from the target environment. Similar-
ly, the sleep interval will be prolonged if the
value does not deviate much.
Trigger-based nodes:
• Conflict factor ( i): There is a slight differ-
ence compared with the one in the period-
ic nodes that the occurrence places of the
trigger event decide the conflict area. There
is a factor p i indicating the probability of
SNi’s coverage area. With a lower pi, SNs are
more likely to cover the occurrence place of
the trigger event and their sleep interval will
be reduced, and vice versa.
• Battery level (Ei): For trigger-based nodes, it is
more important to sense when the trigger is
fired in order to save energy. However, the
sleep interval will be prolonged when the bat-
tery level is rather low to gain a whole lifetime
increase from the system perspective.
Wake up Mechanism: With the calculated
value, GN sends a signal to wake up the SN when
the sleep interval expires. On the third occasion
that an SN wants to talk to another, the commu-
nication is carried out via a GN, as shown in Fig. 4.
The sender node indicates the communication
type as critical, calling for an immediate action.
Noncritical communication refers to the case
where the contained information from the com-
municated message can be dealt with in the near
future. Based on this, when a SN wants to talk to
another SN in sleep mode, the GN will check the
type of the information. When it is critical, a wake-
up signal is sent immediately to guarantee no pack-
et loss. Otherwise, the GN saves the information
from the sender SN and forwards it when the SN
wakes up. Thus, it is the GN that helps efficiently
utilize energy by switching the state of the SNs.
Control Nodes
When it comes to CNs, we mainly focus on their
control over GNs. They relay the information col-
lected by SNs to the cloud server. Any required
information is passed on to GNs through CNs.
In other words, they set up a bridge between the
cloud server and sense entities.
In addition, the allocation of SNs to GNs is
decided by a CN based on the battery level of
the GNs and the distance between the SNs and
the GNs. The allocation of SN i to GN j is then
calculated using d(i, j), which shows the distance
between SNi and GNj and Ej, which is the battery
level of GNj that is under the control of the CN.
When there is a battery level shift occurring at any
GN, the CN calculates a(i, j) again.
In this way, the CN acts as a manager to bal-
ance the loads of the system and thus obtain an
efficient utilization of the resources.
Performance Evaluation
In this section, the evaluation is given to validate
the effectiveness of our proposed architecture
measured by resource utilization and energy con-
sumption.
Experimental Setup
We deployed 300 nodes in a 100  100 m 2
region and they included 250 SNs and 50 GNs.
The server at the lab acts as the CN and the cloud
server. Among the SNs, there are both periodic
 100 1e7
1.0
Original Optimized
Optimized Original

80 0.8
Resource utilization rate (%)

Energy consumption (nJ)

60 0.6

40 0.4

0.2
20

0.0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 00 00
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 30 60 90 120 150 180 210 24 27 30
Time (min) Number of nodes
(a) (b)

Figure 5. Experimental results: a) Resource utilization; b) Energy consumption.

nodes and trigger-based nodes. The assignment regarding the nodes, a sleep scheduling and wake
of each SN to a spcific GN is calculated by the up protocol has been proposed. By calculating
CN, and the energy-efficient algorithm is running the sleep interval of SNs, the GN can change the
at the GN’s side. Data collected by the SNs are state of SNs for the purpose of efficient energy
sent to the data center that hosts Hadoop via utilization. Meanwhile, the CN decides the alloca-
their GNs. The conflict factor is assumed to be tion of SNs to GNs. An evaluation has validated
zero. Given the number of nodes that may be the effectiveness of our architecture in improving
at a low level, we use a bootstrapping technique resource utilization and energy consumption.
[13] to bootstrap nodes 300 to 3000. Then, the
performance of these nodes is observed within a Acknowledgment
180-minute experiment, with and without calculat- This work is supported by NSFC (61572262); the
ed sleep intervals. To determine the scalability, we NSF of Jiangsu Province (BK20141427); NUPT
repeat the experiment with a varying number of (NY214097); the Open Research Fund of the Key
nodes. After that, resource utilization and energy Lab of Broadband Wireless Communication and
consumption are measured and shown in Fig. 5a Sensor Network Technology (NUPT), the Minis-
and Fig. 5b, where the optimized curve stands for try of Education (NYKL201507); the Qinlan Proj-
the results of adopting our proposal based on the ect of Jiangsu Province; the ERANet LAC Project
original ones. (ELAC2015/T10- 0761); and CONICYT FONDEF
(ID16I10466).
Performance Analysis
As shown in Fig. 5a, considerable improvement References
in resource utilization is achieved due to the strict [1] C. Sarkar et al., “A Scalable Distributed Architecture Towards
schedule of mode switching using predicted sleep Unifying IoT Applications,” Proc. IEEE World Forum on Inter-
net of Things (WF-IoT), Mar. 2014, pp. 508--13.
intervals for nodes. Figure 5b shows the architec- [2] J. Leu, C. Chen, and K. Hsu, “Improving Heterogeneous
ture’s scalability, as a significant amount of ener- SOA-based IoT Message Stability by Shortest Processing
gy can be saved by increasing the number of Time Scheduling,” IEEE Trans. Services Comp., vol. 7, no. 4,
nodes. This is due to the fact that as the network Oct. 2014, pp. 575--85.
[3] C. Estevez and J. Wu, “Recent Advances in Green Internet of
becomes larger, our architecture will play a more Things,” Proc. IEEE Latin-American Conf. Commun. (LATIN-
important role in optimizing energy consumption. COM), Nov. 2015, pp. 1–5.

Conclusions
[4] S. F. Abedin et al., “A System Model for Energy Efficient
Green-IoT Network,” Proc. Int’l. Conf. Information Network-
ing (ICOIN), Jan. 2015, pp. 177–82.
With the emerging applications of IoT [14, 15], [5] H. Chao, Y. Chen, and J. Wu, “Power Saving for Machine to
it may be adopted to protect industry plants via Machine Communications in Cellular Networks,” Proc. IEEE
control and surveillance, which in turn will intro- GLOBECOM Wksps., Dec. 2011, pp. 389–93.
duce critical energy consumption issues. From [6] Z. Sheng et al., “Recent Advances in Industrial Wireless Sen-
sor Networks Towards Effcient Management in IoT,” IEEE
the perspective of energy saving in industry, we Access, vol. 3, June 2015, pp. 622–37.
adopted an architecture composed of a sense [7] P. Li, S. Guo, and J. K. Hu, “Energy-Efficient Cooperative
entities domain, RESTful service hosted networks, Communications for Multimedia Applications in Multi-Chan-
a cloud server, and user applications. Then, to the nel Wireless Networks,” IEEE Trans. Computers, vol. 64, no.
6, June 2015, pp. 2670–279.
massive deployments of nodes in the sense enti- [8] G. Han et al., “Cross-Layer Optimized Routing in Wireless
ties domain, we presented a three-layer architec- Sensor Networks with Duty Cycle and Energy Harvesting,”
ture that includes a sense layer, a gateway layer, Wireless Commun. and Mobile Comp., vol. 15, no. 16, Mar.
and a control layer. By forbidding direct commu- 2015, pp. 1957–81.
[9] W. B. Heinzelman, A. P. Chandrakasan, and H. Balakrishnan,
nication between two SNs and using GNs as relay “An Application-Specific Protocol Architecture for Wireless
nodes, the proposed structure may save energy Microsensor Networks,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol.
and prolong the lifetime of the system. Moreover, 1, no. 4, Oct. 2002, pp. 660–70.

IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016 53

 [10] J. Huang et al., “A Novel Deployment Scheme for Green
Internet of Things,” IEEE Internet of Things J., vol. 1, no. 2,
Apr. 2014, pp. 196–205.
[11] J. Liang et al., “An Energy-Efficient Sleep Scheduling with
QoS Consideration in 3GPP LTE-Advanced Networks for
Internet of Things,” IEEE J. Emerg. Sel. Topics Circuits Syst.,
vol. 3, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 13–22.
[12] N. Kaur and S. K. Sood, “An Energy-Efficient Architecture
for the Internet of Things,” IEEE Systems J., no. 99, Oct.
2015, pp. 1–10 .
[13] X. Bao et al., “Helping Mobile Apps Bootstrap with Fewer
Users,” Proc. ACM Conf. Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp),
Sept. 2012, pp. 491–500.
[14] K. Wang et al., “LDPA: A Local Data Processing Archi-
tecture in Ambient Assisted Living Communications,” IEEE
Commun. Mag., vol. 53, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 56–63.
[15] K. Wang et al., “Mobile Big Data Fault-Tolerant Processing
for eHealth Networks,” IEEE Network, vol. 30, no. 1, Jan.
2016, pp. 1–7.
Biographies
Kun Wang [M’13] (kwang@njupt.edu.cn) received the B.Eng.
and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Computer, Nanjing Uni-
versity of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2004
and 2009, respectively. From 2013 to 2015 he was a post-doctor-
al fellow with the Electrical Engineering Department, University
of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), CA, USA. In 2016 he was a
research fellow with the School of Computer Science and Engi-
neering, University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan. He is currently an
associate professor with the School of Internet of Things, Nanjing
University of Posts and Telecommunications. His current research
interests are mainly in the area of big data, wireless communica-
tions and networking, smart grid, energy Internet, and information
security technologies. He is a member of ACM.
54 IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2016
Yihua Wang (benbenc2010@163.com) is a graduate student
with the School of Internet of Things at Nanjing University of
Posts and Telecommunications, China. Her current research
interests include wireless sensor networks, embedded systems,
and cyber-physical systems.
Yanfei Sun (sunyanfei@njupt.edu.cn) received the Ph.D. degree
in information networks from the Nanjing University of Posts
and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2006. He has been
a professor with the School of Automation, Nanjing Univer-
sity of Posts and Telecommunications, since 2006. His main
research interests are in the areas of intelligent optimization,
network management, machine learning, and future networks.
Song Guo [M’02, SM’11] (song.guo@polyu.edu.hk) received a
Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Otta-
wa, Canada. He is a full professor in the Department of Com-
puting, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research
interests are mainly in the areas of wireless communication
and mobile computing, cloud computing and networking, and
cyber-physical systems. He serves as an associate editor of IEEE
TGCN and IEEE TETC. He is a senior member of ACM.
Jinsong Wu [M’99, SM’11] (wujs@ieee.org) is with the Depart-
ment of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, Santia-
go, Chile. He was the lead editor and a co-author of the book
Green Communications: Theoretical Fundamentals, Algorithms,
and Applications (CRC Press, 2012). He is the founder and-
founding chair of the Technical Committee on Green Commu-
nications and Computing (TCGCC) of the IEEE Communications
Society, which was established in 2011 as an official Technical
Subcommittee (TSCGCC) and elevated as TCGCC in 2013. He
is an associate editor of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tuto-
rials, IEEE Systems Journal, and IEEE Access.