A Novel IoT Protocol Architecture: Efficiency through Data and Functionality Sharing across Layers

Motivated by the need to accommodate IoT devices that have limited power, processing, storage, and communication capabilities, this work introduces IoTUS, or IoT Unified Services (IoTUS), a novel network protocol architecture that targets energy efficiency and compact memory footprint. IoTUS uses an extensible service layer that facilitates cross-layer sharing. It promotes sharing of both network control information, (e.g., number of transmissions, receptions, collisions at the data-link layer) and functionality (e.g., neighbor discovery, aggregation) by different layers of the protocol stack. Additionally, IoTUS can be used by existing network stacks without having to modify the basic operation of their protocols. We implemented IoTUS on the Cooja-Contiki network simulator/emulator. Our experimental results show improved energy efficiency resulting in longer network lifetime, as well as more compact memory footprint resulting when compared to current IoT protocol architectures.