Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0758-7 ORIGINAL RESEARCH SEES: a scalable and energy‑efcient scheme for green IoT‑based heterogeneous wireless nodes Antar Shaddad H. Abdul‑Qawy 1  · T. Srinivasulu 1 Received: 21 September 2017 / Accepted: 11 March 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Realizing energy-efcient communication in the IoT-based large-scale systems has become a key challenge in the past few years. The need is to minimize the global energy usage of battery-operated objects so as to reduce data transmission cost and extend the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose SEES, a scalable and energy-efcient scheme for green IoT-based heterogeneous wireless nodes. We study the impact of energy-harvesting techniques by utilizing ambient energy-harvesting relay nodes in such a way that enables a higher energy conservation and guarantees a long-lived network. SEES includes: (1) a zone-based hybrid-placement scheme, (2) a Multi-Stage Weighted Election heuristic (MSWE), and (3) a Minimum Cost Cross-layer Transmission model (MCCT). Our aim is to ensure an even-random deployment of heterogeneous nodes, a scalable pre-deterministic placement of energy-harvesting nodes, a fair energy-load balancing among all the zones, and a minimum energy-cost for data transmission from the bottom layer to the topmost layer. SEES is a general scheme that supports up to n levels of heterogeneity, as well as m diferent election parameters (static and dynamic, associated with m generated weights), and can be used for any type of IoT-based deployment. Experimental results of extensive simulations indicate the superiority of SEES over the other traditional protocols proposed in literature. It can save up to 62% of the total energy, and, at least, it increases the network lifetime by 58, 68, 70, 42%; the stability period by 192, 108, 424, 150%; and the network throughput by 107, 111, 100, 114%; over LEACH, SEP, ZSEP, and hetDEEC protocols respectively, for all the cases and scenarios tested. Keywords Green IoT · Energy-efciency · Energy harvesting · IoT-based networks · Heterogeneous objects · WSN 1 Introduction As an innovative technology, the IoT plays a key role in vari- ous domains and promises signifcant advantages that enable a broad variety of applications such as building automation, inventory control, healthcare systems, transportation, smart grid, security, fre detection, asset tracking, border sur- veillance, smart lighting, etc. (Maksimovic 2018; Agiwal et al. 2016; Borgia 2014; Al-Fuqaha et al. 2015; Sohraby et al. 2007). For instance, IoT-based data collection, or so- called intelligent ambient, has become one of the major applications. The key task is to periodically gather critical information that describes the components of our physical world and the surrounding environments so the appropri- ate action can be taken. This includes intelligent sensing, video surveillance, remote monitoring, big data analytics, etc. (Qin et al. 2016; Perera et al. 2015; Carbajales et al. 2015). Figure 1 shows an example scenario of a typical IoT- based heterogeneous network. However, the estimation said that more than 25 billion of smart things will be in use by 2020 (Mahdavinejad et al. 2017), enabling an intelligent interconnection without human intervention. To keep pace with the commercial development and help vendors to cre- ate standardized IoT products, several eforts and initiatives, driven by major industries and researchers, have been made to provide IoT reference models and architectures (Weyrich and Ebert 2016; Minoli et al. 2017b). For instance, IoT-A (Bauer et al. 2013) is an Architectural Reference Mode (IoT-ARM) that defnes the main concepts of IoT such as devices, services, virtual entities and the relations between them. OSiRM (Open Systems IoT Reference Model) is a new architecture recently proposed by Minoli et al. (2017a), * Antar Shaddad H. Abdul-Qawy eng.antar2007@gmail.com T. Srinivasulu drstadisetty@gmail.com 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, KU College of Engineering and Technology, Kakatiya University, Warangal, India