Internet of Things is already a reality. Nowadays we live in a world where we can easily track every single “thing” by attaching electronic tags to them. However, researchers, developers, and industry face a common problem: balkanization of the IoT technologies in terms of devices, communication architectures, methodologies, frameworks, and APIs. Unfortunately, there is not yet a single standard for IoT that is accepted by all the involved parties. This makes the adoption and scalability of IoT ever more difficult.

Many of such devices/applications are expected to collect large amount of data, and as a consequence they are expected to spend many resources in terms of processing, connectivity, and energy. In particular, wireless network transmission and battery consumption remain as precious resources in a mobile connected world. The more interconnected devices, the higher are the chances for energy consumption. Moreover, a malicious device can be able to attack other devices’ resources, such as the network interface or the battery. In this work, as a first step we propose to perform an extensive study regarding the power consumption and communication techniques viability between IoT and modern smart-devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc.). Furthermore, we will investigate on the possible weaknesses of the current protocols that can be exploited by malicious users to attack other devices and deplete their battery. For example, a malicious user can perform a ping flood attack or a continuous port scanning on targeted devices to force them to use the network interface extensively, causing fast battery draining1. After the security analysis, we will present solutions to reduce the risks and innovative methods to avoid the possible attacks. Improving the energy efficiency of the IoT devices is of vital importance for the dissemination and large adoption of the IoT infrastructure.