IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2021 - 21

Challenges for Sustainable IoT
There are many challenges along with opportunities
that arise in building sustainable smart
villages and smart cities.
Selected Challenges High energy requirement:
High energy requirement is a challenge that any
smart city and smart village needs to handle. The
energy requirements of the cities is as much as
70% of worlds total requirements and it will be
worse with the population migration to cities.1,11
Various components of the smart cities including
the bigdata computational resource consume significant
amount of energy. The continuous monitoring
and transmission of data to the control
room need an uninterrupted power supply.12 To
cater to the power requirement using fixed
energy resource like battery is a limitation;13
thus, natural energy scavenging and harvesting
techniques should be investigated.
Security and privacy: The privacy and security
is the most crucial aspect in a smart cities scenario.14,15
The refurbished hardware are nowadays
becoming a threat to consumer electronics
products. It needs to secure designs with privacy
intact.
Tradeoffs Through Optimization Energy
and cost: Computational resources as well data
transmission networks need a lot of energy. The
edge node can be made self-sustainable by scavenging
natural energy to power the edge
nodes15,16 instead of using fixed batteries. By
adopting optimized methods at each layer of
computation, the cost factor can be minimized.
Latency and bandwidth: The operation latency
is not only due to the computation, but the network
path also contributes to it specifically
when processing is performed at the IoT-cloud.
The computations can be performed near the
user to reduce the communication latency,
which is the essence of edge/fog computing.17,18
Higher bandwidth allocation at the edge and preprocessing
of data can reduce traffic to the IoTcloud.
Collaborative
IoT-Edge Computing for Smart
Services and Components
IoT-edge or fog computing is decentralized
IoT-computing as compared to IoT-cloud computing,
which is centralized.17,19 Collaborative
May/June 2021
Figure 3. Collaborative Edge can have significant
applications in both smart villages and smart cities.
edge computing connects the IoT-edges of multiple
organizations that can be near or far from
each other, thus, providing bigger computational
capability at the edge.20,21 Collaborative
edge computing can be effective for a variety of
smart services and components in both smart
cities and smart villages (see Figure 3).
Smart Energy Priorities can be set for emergency
activities if energy storage and consumption
are known in advance.22 The photovoltaic
panels can be installed in infrastructures to
meet the energy demands in the cities.12,16,23
The street lighting plays a significant contribution
to the energy consumption of the whole
city. Various parameters including, time of the
day, weather condition, and human/object presence
can be monitored for efficient lighting use
under " smart street lighting. " 24
Waste Management and Air Quality Waste
management is an essential aspect in smart cities
that involves the cost and storage of garbage
in landfills. The use of an intelligent waste collector,
which ultimately manages the load of the
container, and directs the collector vehicle route
to save cost and speed up the recycling process.2
The use of renewable energies can reduce
the pollution level in cities and improve the air
quality.
Smart Transportation IoT sensors can be
placed in cities to find an appropriate place to
facilitate transportation,25,26 which may ensure
less carbon emission from vehicles and less traffic.
Near-field communications (NFC) can be
used to identify slots for parking and occupancy.
21
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