A Study on Energy Management for Low-Power IoT Devices

Abstract

The idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) has received a lot of interest recently because it has the potential to transform our physical world into a meaningful information-filled digital cyber environment. Energy management is an important player in the development of an IoT system. This chapter provides a comprehensive study of the most popular energy management technologies for low-power IoT devices. This study proposed a taxonomy to categorize energy management technologies into two basic groups, which are: technologies that harvest energy and those that conserve it. This chapter begins with a highlight on low-power IoT devices. The architectures for energy harvesting have been described in this chapter. The main energy harvesting sources have also been demonstrated. Following that, IoT energy storage was covered. This chapter also included some IoT system case studies that used energy harvesting. Since there are numerous technologies for energy conservation in low-power IoT devices, energy conservation solutions must be applied at all design abstraction levels, including those for hardware, communication, operating systems, and software. According to that, this chapter divided energy conservation technologies into four main layers: hardware, communication, operating systems, and software. The most cutting-edge and effective energy conservation technologies have been discussed for each layer. Additionally, the roles of cloud and fog computing in IoT devices’ energy management have also been discussed. Readers can gain a general understanding of this subject through this study and encourage further research in the future.