The Internet of Things (IOT), or the Internet of Everything as some major players like Cisco have called it, refers to a connection of processes, humans, mass data, and things (where things would be any hardware within a network). Per Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, IoT reached the “peak of inflated expectations” in 2014, making it a much debated, discussed, and researched emerging technology.

Per Gartner’s take, IoT “is becoming a vibrant part of our, our customers’ and our partners’ business and IT landscape.” The authors of this paper call it the “network of [the] future,” and their focus is to develop an energy-efficient message scheduling algorithm considering node failure in IoT.

With the vastness of IoT, scheduling is a concern. The authors realize scheduling improves the overall IoT systems’ efficiency. Their quest to develop a scheduling algorithm is a considerable challenge, but their approach is promising: it includes illustrating a messaging system architecture, developing an energy consumption model and subsequent algorithms for both message scheduling and backup node selection, and a comprehensive simulation.

The depth of the pre-work and research becomes clear in the 18 related works cited. In reviewing past and current research, the main challenge of their work is prolonging the battery life of the sensor devices in order to prolong the overall lifetime of IoT systems.

Section 4 details the core contribution with an introduction to a model for energy consumption; the instruction of a message scheduling algorithm considering node failure; and another step-by-step algorithm for the backup node selection procedure that eases the potential computational challenge. However, failing nodes by changing their energy levels to zero may not present a complete real-life scenario since nodes may fail for several other reasons.

Finally, the performance evaluation and included analysis using MATLAB provide a proof of concept, offering a good starting point for readers and test data for active researchers. In general, the paper does embody a main contribution on IoT.