Energy-Efficient IoT for 5G: A Framework for Adaptive Power and Rate Control

In the near future, a vast number of IoT devices are expected to join the Internet. Many of these devices are powered by battery as their sole energy source, where energy-efficiency is of utmost importance to prolong the lifespan of these devices over next generation networks. This paper proposes an energy-efficient framework for adaptively controlling the transmit power and data rate of the IoT device in order to minimize the energy-consumption in 5G networks. Many of the envisioned IoT applications are latency insensitive such as utility metering, environmental monitoring, and logistic tracking. We prove that by using a simple retransmission scheme we can significantly enhance the energy-efficiency while preserving the rate of successful message delivery. The framework is tested using real measurements of LoRa technology and compared against other legacy modulation schemes currently implemented in IoT systems. Results show that significant energy saving can be achieved by applying this proposed framework.