Wireless energy harvesting for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging computing concept that describes a structure in which everyday physical objects, each provided with unique identifiers, are connected to the Internet without requiring human interaction.Long-term and self-sustainable operation are key components for realization of such a complex network, and entail energy-aware devices that are potentially capable of harvesting their required energy from ambient sources. Among different energy harvesting methods such as vibration, light and thermal energy extraction, wireless energy harvesting (WEH) has proven to be one of the most promising solutions by virtue of its simplicity, ease of implementation and availability. In this article, we present an overview of enabling technologies for efficient WEH, analyze the life-time of WEH-enabled IoT devices, and briefly study the future trends in the design of efficient WEH systems and research challenges that lie ahead.

Efficient Energy Management for the Internet of Things in Smart Cities

“…In other words, smart city solutions have to be energy-efficient, cost-efficient, reliable, secure, and so on. For example, IoT devices should operate in a self-sufficient way without compromising quality of service (QoS) in order to enhance the performance with uninterrupted network operations [2]. Therefore, the energy efficiency and life span of IoT devices are key to next generation smart city solutions.…”

“…The aim of energy harvesting is to increase the lifetime of IoT devices. The research topics included within both types of energy harvesting are energy harvesting receiver design, energy arrival rate, placement of a minimum number of dedicated energy sources, scheduling of dedicated energy sources, and multi-path energy routing [2,6].…”

IoT’s Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco’s Perspective

“…One of the most important obstacles for implementing such an impressive scheme is supplying adequate energy to operate the network in a self-sufficient way without compromising QoS [180]. Since energy efficiency is of most importance to battery constrained IoT devices, researches have focused their work on the development of the device energy saving mechanisms.…”

“…Among different energy harvesting methods, wireless energy harvesting (WEH) has proven to be one of the most promising solution for energy aware IoT devices, because of its simplicity, ease of implementation, and availability [180]. This concept will improve some of the 5G high network communication requirements, like reliability of IoT communications, as presented in [182].…”

Prototype for multidisciplinary research in the context of the Internet of Things

“…Moreover, if there are to be billions or trillions of IoT devices then it will be impossible to use batteries for every single IoT device (it would be impractical, costly, and unsustainable). Energy harvesting techniques are particularly relevant in the context of IoT [12,13], which require novel tailored antenna and circuit designs [14,15].…”