IoT devices: The quest for energy security

Analysts predict that by 2020, more than 50 billion devices to be deployed and interconnected to serve Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, battery powered devices are vulnerable to periodic battery replacement as their operating time gets limited, and this indicates a high operational and maintenance cost which will affect the economic viability to deploy devices. As a consequence, the energy procurement and energy usage are key factors for sustainability. This paper tackles the energy issue for the IoT devices, and it presents an overview of energy sources and energy harvesting challenges. The paper also proposes recommendations to operate the networked IoT devices in a self-sufficient manner and to acquire the “Place-and-Forget” functionality.