# The IoT energy challenge: A software perspective

## TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of energy transparency in software development to optimize energy consumption in IoT devices operating on limited or unreliable energy sources.

## Contribution

It highlights the need for energy transparency in IoT software and explores how it can be implemented to address energy challenges.

## Key findings

- Energy transparency can improve software energy efficiency.
- Current lack of feedback hampers energy optimization.
- Implementing transparency aids in tackling IoT energy issues.

## Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) sparks a whole new world of embedded applications. Most of these applications are based on deeply embedded systems that have to operate on limited or unreliable sources of energy, such as batteries or energy harvesters. Meeting the energy requirements for such applications is a hard challenge, which threatens the future growth of the IoT. Software has the ultimate control over hardware. Therefore, its role is significant in optimizing the energy consumption of a system. Currently, programmers have no feedback on how their software affects the energy consumption of a system. Such feedback can be enabled by energy transparency, a concept that makes a program's energy consumption visible, from hardware to software. This paper discusses the need for energy transparency in software development and emphasizes on how such transparency can be realized to help tackling the IoT energy challenge.