Wireless Pers Commun (2014) 79:1815–1835 DOI 10.1007/s11277-014-1960-3 An Energy Efficient Message Scheduling Algorithm Considering Node Failure in IoT Environment Saima Abdullah · Kun Yang Published online: 30 July 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Advancements in the area of computing and the networking gave birth to a new concept Internet of Things (IoT). This can be thought as “network of future” connecting diverse objects/things together. The focus is on scheduling the messages in an IoT environ- ment where things/sensors are clustered into IoT subgroups, each subgroup has a message broker that delivers the messages originated from the group to the ultimate receiver of the sensed data. The message scheduler works at the broker level to decide which message to be transmitted first. This scheduling improves the overall IoT system efficiency. Furthermore to keep the flow of services provided by these things/sensors continuous and non-disruptive, the optimal tackling of the faulty or failed nodes has become the salient feature of the proposed scheduling algorithm. The faults or failures identified on time help to initiate recovery or replacement procedures. To find the right level of replacement nodes deployed for the sensor network, we consider the energy a scarce resource and the cost of deployment of the backup nodes as per failure of the node occurring in the underlying environment. In this work we propose an energy efficient recovery and backup node selection for IoT systems followed with energy efficient message scheduling. Simulation results show the effectiveness and effi- ciency of the proposed message scheduling considering the node failure with recovery and replacement technique. Keywords IoT · Message scheduling · Energy efficient · Network awareness · Node failure · Backup node selection 1 Introduction Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm of heterogeneous devices which are distributed over the globe and exchanging information between them. IoT is the vision of the future S. Abdullah (B ) · K. Yang School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK e-mail: abdullahsaima@yahoo.com K. Yang e-mail: kunyang@essex.ac.uk 123