Characterizing Energy Efficiency of Wireless Transmission for Green Internet of Things: A Data-Oriented Approach

The growing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) applications brings new challenges to the wireless communication community. Numerous smart devices and sensors within IoT will generate a massive amount of short data packets. Future wireless transmission systems need to support the reliable transmission of such small data with extremely high energy efficiency. In this article, we introduce a novel data-oriented approach for characterizing the energy efficiency of wireless transmission strategies for IoT applications. Specifically, we present new energy efficiency performance limits targeting at individual data transmission sessions. Through preliminary analysis on two channel-adaptive transmission strategies, we develop several important design guidelines on green transmission of small data. We also present several promising future applications of the proposed data-oriented energy efficiency characterization.