A Comparative Analysis of Important Energy Conservation Approaches in IoT

The basic premise of an IoT device is to deliver a new class of applications wherein smart sensors collaborate directly amongst each other without any human intervention. In the coming years, IoT would play a major role in facilitating intelligent decision-making by connecting multiple physical objects together. However, the bridging of diverse technologies to enable new applications would consist of devices that are energy constrained. Thus, meeting the energy requirements of such applications is a challenge, one that threatens the future growth of IoT if left unacknowledged. This paper starts by providing an insight into IoT's layered architecture with a clear indication of the various power-hungry components within each layer. Then, we present an overview of some of the key energy management schemes along with the advantages and limitations of each. The paper throws light upon a hierarchical, energy-efficient framework based upon cluster head selection in IoT devices, one of the most promising methods till date as per our research. Our objective is to provide a thorough summary of the fundamentals of energy conservation in an IoT environment, such that researchers and developers could get up to date quickly on the vast literature available on the subject.