From serendipity to sustainable green IoT: Technical, industrial and political perspective

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the largest electronics market for hardware production due to its fast evolving application space. However, one of the key challenges for IoT hardware is the energy efficiency as most of IoT devices/objects are expected to run on batteries for months/years without a battery replacement or on harvested energy sources. Widespread use of IoT has also led to a large-scale rise in the carbon footprint. In this regard, academia, industry and policy-makers are constantly working towards new energy-efficient hardware and software solutions paving the way for an emerging area referred to as green-IoT. With the direct integration and the evolution of smart communication between physical world and computer-based systems, IoT devices are also expected to reduce the total amount of energy consumption for the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. However, in order to increase its chance of success and to help at reducing the overall energy consumption and carbon emissions a comprehensive investigation into how to achieve green-IoT is required. In this context, this paper surveys the green perspective of the IoT paradigm and aims to contribute at establishing a global approach for green-IoT environments. A comprehensive approach is presented that focuses not only on the specific solutions but also on the interaction among them, and highlights the precautions/decisions the policy makers need to take. On one side, the ongoing European projects and standardization efforts as well as industry and academia based solutions are presented and on the other side, the challenges, open issues, lessons learned and the role of policymakers towards green-IoT are discussed. The survey shows that due to many existing open issues (e.g., technical considerations, lack of standardization, security and privacy, governance and legislation, etc.) that still need to be addressed, a realistic implementation of a sustainable green-IoT environment that could be universally accepted and deployed, is still missing.