PSON: A Serialization Format for IoT Sensor Networks

Yet Another Compact Time Series Data Representation Using CBOR Templates (YACTS)

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is growing rapidly, while the IoT devices are being deployed massively. However, interoperability with information systems remains a major challenge for this accelerated device deployment. Furthermore, most of the time, IoT information is presented as Time Series (TS), and while the majority of the studies in the literature focus on the prediction, compression, or processing of TS, no standardized representation format has emerged. Moreover, apart from interoperability, IoT networks contain multiple constrained devices which are designed with limitations, e.g., processing power, memory, or battery life. Therefore, in order to reduce the interoperability challenges and increase the lifetime of IoT devices, this article introduces a new format for TS based on CBOR. The format exploits the compactness of CBOR by leveraging delta values to represent measurements, employing tags to represent variables, and utilizing templates to convert the TS data representation into the appropriate format for the cloud-based application. Moreover, we introduce a new refined and structured metadata to represent additional information for the measurements, then we provide a Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL) code to validate the CBOR structures against our proposal, and finally, we present a detailed performance evaluation to validate the adaptability and the extensibility of our approach. Our performance evaluation results show that the actual data sent by IoT devices can be reduced by between 88% and 94% compared to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), between 82% and 91% compared to Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and ASN.1, and between 60% and 88% compared to Protocol buffers. At the same time, it can reduce Time-on-Air by between 84% and 94% when a Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technology such as LoRaWAN is employed, leading to a 12-fold increase in battery life compared to CBOR format or between a 9-fold and 16-fold increase when compared to Protocol buffers and ASN.1, respectively. In addition, the proposed metadata represent an additional 0.5% of the overall data transmitted in cases where networks such as LPWAN or Wi-Fi are employed. Finally, the proposed template and data format provide a compact representation of TS that can significantly reduce the amount of data transmitted containing the same information, extend the battery life of IoT devices, and improve their lifetime. Moreover, the results show that the proposed approach is effective for different data types and it can be integrated seamlessly into existing IoT systems.

Fast Control for Backlight Power-Saving Algorithm Using Motion Vectors from the Decoded Video Stream

Backlight power-saving algorithms can reduce the power consumption of the display by adjusting the frame pixels with optimal clipping points under some tradeoff criteria. However, the computation for the selected clipping points can be complex. In this paper, a novel algorithm is created to reduce the computation time of the state-of-the-art backlight power-saving algorithms. If the current frame is similar to the previous frame, it is unnecessary to execute the backlight power-saving algorithm for the optimal clipping points, and the derived clipping point from the previous frame can be used for the current frame automatically. In this paper, the motion vector information was used as the measurement of the similarity between adjacent frames, where the generation of the motion vector information requires no extra complexity since it is generated to reconstruct the decoded frame pixels before the display. The experiments showed that the proposed work can reduce the running time of the state-of-the-art methods by 25.21% to 64.22%, while the performances are maintained; the differences with the state-of-the-art methods in PSNR are only 0.02~1.91 dB, and those in power are only -0.001~0.008 W.