Green Internet of Things: A Survey of Enabling Techniques

Pervasive computing which enables manipulation, storage and communication amenities to appear everywhere and anytime is a promising paradigm in human's daily life. It requires seamless assimilation and interaction of complex and heterogeneous systems under the umbrella of the Internet of Things. Enormous devices used in Internet of Things sense, gather and communicate important information from their environments. This exchange of large volume of data among billions of connected devices demands massive energy and thus has led to an increase in the carbon footprint. Therefore, new energy efficient architectures with the reservation of renewable energy resources are progressively drawing lot of efforts to attain an ecologically balanced “Green” world. Green Internet of Things visualizes the concept of minimizing the energy consumption by devices. This paper reviews the need and requirement of Green Internet of Things. It explores and discusses efficient utilization of various enabling techniques to achieve Green Internet of Things. The paper also evaluates the strategies such as devising energy efficient data centers, energy efficient transmission of data from sensors, and implementation of energy efficient policies that promise to reduce the energy consumption. Further, the paper critically evaluates existing strategies for Green Internet of Things and recommends few to attain this initiative.