Rethinking Sustainable Sensing in Agricultural Internet of Things: From Power Supply Perspective

Agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to address several challenges facing the current agriculture industry, including food production, food safety, ecological environment protection, and food waste. However, before achieving this blueprint, a fundamental problem that should be addressed is the sustainability. Unfortunately, solar energy harvesting, which is today's common approach for sustainable agricultural IoT, has many limitations and can barely support future development. This article bridges this gap by proposing a versatile power supply paradigm, called PowerEdge, that organically integrates ambient energy harvesting, distributed energy storage, wireless power transfer, and intelligent reflecting surface techniques to achieve sustainable smart agricultural operations. A proof of concept with commercially available products is also presented, along with extensive experimental studies in five scenarios. Several interesting novel observations are found. Finally, four technical challenges and four open research issues associated with the proposed solution are discussed.