Application-dependent frame design for the Internet of Things

Data of the internet of things (IoT) typically consists of packets with small payloads since the protocol header is a significant and energy-expensive overhead. A variety of applications in IoT make it more complicated than that in wireless sensor networks in which one application generally exists. In this work, we present a scheme that replaces conventional frame design with a multiple-frame solution which aims at maximizing the network bandwidth utility for prolonging the network lifetime of energy-constrained IoT. Specifically, it is designed for inheriting all advantages of the fixed size packet MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks. Basically, the proposed scheme can be viewed as a proper extension of fixed-length frame scheme whether in wireline network or wireless network in IoT. The effectiveness of scheme is demonstrated by comparing the energy efficiency with the fixed-size frame for WSN and the variable-size frame for WLANs. This would be of great use in energy-constrained IoT applications.