Power consumption for global information dissemination in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a research topic, where billions of things, both sensing and actuating, connect to the Internet, interact, exchange information and enable intelligent services. Current resource consumption models are adapted to information distribution where the cost of information gathering is neglected. However, the emerging Internet of Things will contain billions of sensors that are capable of producing information in real-time, which both demand more resources, and is of interest to fewer users. In this paper, we present an analytical power model for both information collection and distribution in order to find the total power consumption of the Internet of Things. We apply the model to both a centralized and a distributed scenario where billions of devices produce and consume sensor information continuously. We find through analysis that there is a reduced power consumption for content traffic in distributed solutions when compared with centralized solutions for equal numbers of devices, sensors, and users. Thus, we conclude that a fully distributed solution for information gathering and dissemination is preferable to centralized solutions for retrieving the current version of information that changes often.