Minimizing IoT Energy Consumption Using BLE and Metaprotocol Architecture

The Internet of Things is a very fast‐growing industry thanks to the increasing availability of cheap microcontrollers, which are its main component. However, the commonly used cloud technologies are not best suited for resource‐constrained devices, so energy optimization is needed to extend their battery life. This paper builds on previous work that presented a novel IoT architecture and its “metaprotocol” that enables the integration of even the simplest IoT devices into an IoT network. For this research, they were implemented on several microcontrollers, and then energy consumption was minimized by trying out several key functions for resource‐constrained devices. The tests were carried out in different scenarios using BLE, ranging from a very simple to a very complex scenario, and the resource consumption is measured along the way. Later, the results are compared with the use of the “metaprotocol” with common IoT technologies, including MQTT, CoAP, ZigBee, and Thread. The comparison shows that the presented IoT architecture used with BLE outperforms mainstream protocols in terms of RAM usage, flash usage, time consumption, and energy consumption for these scenarios, regardless of the architecture built on top of them. The difference was even an order of magnitude in some cases, which also highlights the inadequacy of some current solutions.