Efficient Energy Management for Internet of Things in Smart Cities

The drastic increase in urbanization over the past few years requires sustainable, efficient, and smart solutions for transportation, governance, environment, quality of life, etc. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers many sophisticated and ubiquitous applications for smart cities. The energy demand of IoT applications is increased, while the IoT devices continue to grow in both numbers and their requirements. Therefore, smart city solutions must have the ability to efficiently utilize energy and handle associated challenges. Energy management is considered as a key paradigm for the realization of complex energy systems in smart cities. In this article, we present a brief overview of energy management and challenges in smart cities. We then provide a unifying framework for energy-efficient optimization and scheduling of IoT-based smart cities. We also discuss the energy harvesting in smart cities, which is a promising solution for extending the lifetime of low power devices and its related challenges. We detail two case studies, the first one targets energyefficient scheduling in smart homes and the second covers wireless power transfer for IoT devices in smart cities. Simulation results for case studies demonstrate the tremendous impact of energyefficient scheduling optimization and wireless power transfer on the performance of IoT in smart cities.