CUPID: A Communication Pattern Informed Duty Cycling for Large-scale, Low-delay Sensor Applications

In an Internet of Things (IoT), a plethora of tiny devices will extend the Internet to the physical world and allow for a completely new class of applications. Two possible IoT scenarios are public safety (e.g., surveillance of areas and borders) and smart cities that offer smart services to improve the lives of a city’s inhabitants. Both share many underlying challenges in terms of realization. They comprise large-scale deployments of sensor nodes and require longterm, battery-driven operation, low-delay reporting of events, as well as secure and attack-resilient design. However, experiences from real-world trials have shown that decent tradeoffs between these two conflicting goals are hard to find. In this paper, we show how staggered wake-ups achieve this. We call this low-delay and low-power duty cycle management scheme CUPID because its parameterization is based on the expected communication patterns in the network, duty-cycle and latency requirements. We show by simulations and realworld experiments with more than 150 nodes that our scheme significantly reduces the packet delay for low duty cycle settings, especially in large networks.