An Edge/Cloud Continuum with Wearable Kinetic Energy Harvesting IoT Devices in Remote Areas

One of the key factors critical to the advancements of IoT systems in remote areas today are energy-efficient IoT deployment and the integration with IoT /edge/continuum. An energy-efficient IoT deployment requires finding adequate solutions for applications that require remote area devices and the related replacement and charging of batteries. On the other hand, an efficient integration of different communication technologies spanning the IoT, edge and cloud continuum that at the same time can integrate energy harvesting devices in remote areas is still an open challenge. In this paper, we integrate energy harvesting with wearable remote IoT devices on freely roaming farm animals within the edge/cloud continuum along its powerful application layer protocols, MQTT and AMQP. We experimentally investigate the performance of kinetic energy harvester used to power a LoRa module to send application layer messages from IoT to cloud. From the functional system testing perspective, we show that these messages can be successfully forwarded for further processing and evaluation in the edge and cloud setting even from the remote areas. We engineered an inexpensive and first open-source multi-protocol MQTT based communication gateway, as an alternative to today's proprietary and expensive gateway solutions, and we built a system that can not only power the capturing of animal movement patterns outdoors, but also the related application-layer protocol messages.