Development and optimisation of an IoT system

Abstract

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) has been adopted into multiple applications, through which the monitoring of a specific environment can be supervised through a wireless network of sensors. Low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors nowadays have also advanced in terms of accuracy, reliability, and accessibility, of which are capable in being assigned within such a network. One of the persisting problems in this field is the lack of system optimisation through the integrated device’s process of operation, resulting in extra expenses such as excessive data transmission and battery consumption. This dissertation proposes a new approach of implementing an IoT based system using off-the-shelf devices, with a focus on device optimisation. This includes the means of communication and data aggregation methods between the devices distributed within the IoT system, mainly targeting the gateway. This statement was achieved by minimising the overall amount of data being transferred onto the data server by negating any redundant or repeated information collected through the sensing devices. The solution was applied to a vibration monitoring and sensing system, which can be easily replicated and a similar IoT system can be adapted for other similar scenarios. We observe that the optimised gateways are just as powerful as an unoptimised system, whilst saving up to 14% battery consumption over a 10-hour testing period per device.