Greening and Optimizing Energy Consumption of Sensor Nodes in the Internet of Things through Energy Harvesting: Challenges and Approaches

This paper presents a survey of current energy efficient technologies that could drive the IoT revolution while examining critical areas for energy improvements in IoT sensor nodes. The paper reviews improvements in emerging energy techniques which promise to revolutionize the IoT landscape. Moreover, the current work also studies the sources of energy consumption by the IoT sensor nodes in a network and the metrics adopted by various researchers in optimizing the energy consumption of these nodes. Increasingly, researchers are exploring better ways of sourcing sufficient energy along with optimizing the energy consumption of IoT sensor nodes and making these energy sources green. Energy harvesting is the basis of this new energy source. The harvested energy could serve both as the principal and alternative energy source of power and thus increase the energy constancy of the IoT systems by providing a green, sufficient and optimal power source among IoT devices. Communication of IoT nodes in a heterogeneous IoT network consumes a lot of energy and the energy level in the nodes depletes with time. There is the need to optimize the energy consumption of such nodes and the current study discusses this as well.