The Internet of Things (IoT) technology with huge number of power-constrained devices has been heralded to improve the operational efficiency of many industrial applications. It is vital to reduce the energy consumption of each device; however, this could also degrade the quality of service (QoS) provisioning. In this paper, we study the problem of how to achieve the tradeoff between the QoS provisioning and the energy efficiency for the industrial IoT systems. We first formulate the multiobjective optimization problem to achieve the objective of balancing the outage performance and the network lifetime. Then, we propose to combine the quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) with the improved nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to obtain the Pareto-optimal front. In particular, NSGA-II is applied to solve the formulated multiobjective optimization problem, and the QPSO algorithm is used to obtain the optimum cooperative coalition. The simulation results suggest that the proposed algorithm can achieve the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and the QoS provisioning by sacrificing about 10% network lifetime but improving about 15% outage performance. © 2017 IEEE