A comprehensive survey on connectivity for IoT sensor networks

Abstract

Recent demand for Internet of things (IoT) based sensing devices has increased in many significant areas, such as greenhouse monitoring, remote patient monitoring, military applications, wild-life tracking and habitat monitoring, precision agriculture, etc. Moreover, some critical issues are present in the perpetual sensor network like node energy consumption rate, coverage/connectivity, quality of service, network throughput and charging cycle capacity of sensor node batteries. Thereby, various network issues can arise, especially regarding coverage holes, proper connectivity, and network life-time. In this paper, we have studied these problems well and have shown the necessary constraints for the connectivity of the IoT sensor network. Moreover, we have also presented various helpful IoT applications and energy harvested IoT sensor networks. Any network can perform well for a long time because of energy management which is very crucial. This paper presents various feature scopes used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It also illustrates distinct approaches like relay node placement, efficient communication, machine-learning systems i.e. reinforcement learning, and heuristic techniques. It also discusses real-world deployments to highlight practical connectivity challenges and failures.