Empirical Characterization of Solar Panel Outlay and Dimension for Net-Zero Energy IoT System

Internet of Things (IoT) is a cyber-physical architecture bringing a new revolution by developing an intelligent environment and incorporating trillions of sensing, processing, and transmission units. Due to battery energy constraints, it is critical to sustain many IoT devices’ network operations in diverse applications of weather monitoring, smart agriculture etc. In this regard, solar energy harvesting has emerged as a potential solution in developing a net-zero energy IoT (NZ-IoT) architecture to quantify sustainability. For NZ-IoT, this article examines the practical viability of a solar energy harvesting model for empirically characterizing the solar panel dimension (PD) in cm
²
and panel outlay (PO) in INR (Indian Rupee). Furthermore, the sensing outlay and processing outlay (which include both the memory and transmission outlay of sensed data) are also determined. It is accomplished by first developing an IoT-based consumption model and then establishing an empirical relationship between panel dimension and panel outlay. Finally, the simulation results of solar panel dimensions and outlay are computed for a net-zero energy IoT system.