Large-Scale Object Monitoring in Internet-of-Things: Energy-Efficient Perspectives

Abstract

Recently, the demand for monitoring a certain object covering large and dynamic scopes such as wildfires, glaciers, and radioactive contaminations, called large-scale fluid objects (LFOs), is coming to the fore due to disasters and catastrophes that lately happened. This article provides an analytic comparison of such LFOs and typical individual mobile objects (IMOs), namely animals, humans, vehicles, etc., to figure out inherent characteristics of LFOs. Since energy-efficient monitoring of IMOs has been intensively researched so far, but such inherent properties of LFOs hinder the direct adaptation of legacy technologies for IMOs, this article surveys technological evolution and advances of LFOs along with ones of IMOs. Based on the communication cost perspective correlated to energy efficiency, three technological phases, namely concentration, integration, and abbreviation, are defined in this article. By reviewing various methods and strategies employed by existing works with the three phases, this article concludes that LFO monitoring should achieve not only decoupling from node density and network structure but also trading off quantitative reduction against qualitative loss as architectural principles of energy-efficient communication to break through inherent properties of LFOs. Future research challenges related to this topic are also discussed.