bioSmartSense: A Bio-inspired Data Collection Framework for Energy-efficient, QoI-aware Smart City Applications

Abstract

Recent years have seen a proliferation of intelligent (automated) decision support systems for various smart city applications such as energy management, transportation, healthcare, environment monitoring, and so on. A key enabler in the smart city paradigm is the Internet-of-Things (IoT) network of smart sensing and actuation devices assisting in real-time detection and monitoring of physical phenomena. The underlying IoT network must be energy-efficient for application sustainability and also quality of information (QoI)-aware for near-perfect device actuation. To this end, this paper proposes bioSmartSense, a novel bio-inspired distributed event sensing and data collection framework, based on the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) in living organisms. The idea is to make the sensing and reporting tasks energy-efficient through self-modulation of IoT device energy levels, analogous to the activation or repression of genes by the regulating proteins, called Transcription Factors (TFs). To support energy-efficient and QoI-aware information dissemination, we first customize a heuristic designed for the Maximum Weighted Independent Set problem encompassing both `quality' and `quantity' of sensed data, where the former depends on the device energy levels while the latter on the number of events sensed. We utilize the heuristic to propose a sub-optimal device selection mechanism constrained on the IoT network's overall residual energy. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the bioSmartSense framework achieves better energy-efficiency while maximizing event reporting compared to a state-of-the-art data collection approach for smart city applications.