Green IoT (G-IoT) Ecosystem for Smart Cities

Introduction

Green IoT would be a moving factor contributing towards energy efficiency by reducing energy utilization either by using software or hardware procedures. When the term Green IoT is stated, there could be two possible ways one could interpret. Are we going to utilize IoT in order to reduce the greenhouse effect or are we looking at the impact of IoT contributing to the greenhouse effect? In the earlier term we should investigate sustainable green applications or infrastructures by incorporating IoT into the design whereas the later focuses more on making the IoT devices more energy efficient. In either case, the entire green IoT lifecycle should focus on green design, green communication, green production, green utilization and green disposal. The design and production of the entire green architecture (device, communication, networking) should be power aware and the utilization and disposal of green devices and technology in order to reduce the greenhouse effects. With this, the global carbon emission reduction and energy consumption savings can be achieved as anticipated by the European Union. A global smart Green IoT Ecosystem (Figure 1) can be foreseen, focusing on the three main IoT domains in the area of application, infrastructure and energy management.

Figure 1.

Green IoT Ecosystem

This green IoT ecosystem (Figure 1) is going to be the main contributor in achieving a smarter city with the key focus on sustainability. Smart city framework (Figure 2) consists of smart governance, smart environment, smart living, smart people, smart mobility and smart economy. These six pillars of smart city should be incorporated into the IoT domain (Figure 3)) to create a synergy between Green IoT and Smart City for a generic green ecosystem. While making “THINGS” smart, the green ecosystem should be incorporated to make “THINGS” green (energy aware) as well. To anticipate such vision, research focus should be on the challenges faced by energy hungry IoT devices like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID devices are very much power hungry and these inter-connected tiny devices are sharing huge amounts of data to the cloud and data centers leading to huge power consumption as well. So innovative ideas are required on how to make these tiny RFID devices green while also making the cloud (G-CC) and data centers green (G-DC). Reducing the sizes of RFID tags, investing into biodegradable, printable or paper-based RFID tags could be some solutions. Virtualization of data centers and cloud can reduce the amount of data transmission whilst making them more energy efficient. Green Wireless Sensor Network (G-WSN) is another main domain in IoT that needs attention although there are a lot of researches going on in this domain. More energy focused realms need attention like energy efficient/aware/hierarchical routing algorithms, scheduling algorithms, radio optimization techniques, data reduction/aggregation, clustering and efficient communication like 5G (G-cellular). The sensor designs themselves should be more power focused, utilizing green sources of energy/harvesting, wireless energy charging and reducing transmission power. Smart grid systems can be deployed for this purpose by automatically monitoring and controlling energy flows between the energy network and smart alliances or sensor/actuator nodes (G-M2M). The vision of Smart City cannot be materialized without exploring into the application domain. Smart city is transforming with emerging applications like e-government, waste management, smart water management, green building, smart building, smart parking, traffic management and environment monitoring.

Figure 2.

Smartcity Framework