Task Scheduling for Simultaneous IoT Sensing and Energy Harvesting: A Survey and Critical Analysis

TL;DR

This paper surveys task scheduling algorithms for energy harvesting IoT sensors, focusing on energy positive sensing that harvests more energy than needed, enabling sustainable and autonomous IoT operations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey and critical analysis of task scheduling for energy positive sensors, highlighting differences from conventional sensing and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Energy harvesting enables perpetual IoT sensor operation.

Energy positive sensors can harvest more energy than they consume.

Scheduling algorithms must address intermittent and unpredictable energy availability.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has important applications in our daily lives including health and fitness tracking, environmental monitoring and transportation. However, sensor nodes in IoT suffer from the limited lifetime of batteries resulting from their finite energy availability. A promising solution is to harvest energy from environmental sources, such as solar, kinetic, thermal and radio frequency, for perpetual and continuous operation of IoT sensor nodes. In addition to energy generation, recently energy harvesters have been used for context detection, eliminating the need for additional activity sensors (e.g. accelerometers), saving space, cost, and energy consumption. Using energy harvesters for simultaneous sensing and energy harvesting enables energy positive sensing -- an important and emerging class of sensors, which harvest higher energy than required for signal acquisition and the additional energy can be used to power other components of the system. Although simultaneous sensing and energy harvesting is an important step forward towards autonomous self-powered sensor nodes, the energy and information availability can be still intermittent, unpredictable and temporally misaligned with various computational tasks on the sensor node. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on task scheduling algorithms for the emerging class of energy harvesting-based sensors (i.e., energy positive sensors) to achieve the sustainable operation of IoT. We discuss inherent differences between conventional sensing and energy positive sensing and provide an extensive critical analysis for devising new task scheduling algorithms incorporating this new class of sensors. Finally, we outline future research directions towards the implementation of autonomous and self-powered IoT.