Task Scheduling for Energy-Harvesting-Based IoT: A Survey and Critical Analysis

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 (RF) waves, 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 conventional 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 more energy than required for context detection 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 toward 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 article 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 revised task scheduling algorithms incorporating this new class of sensors. Finally, we outline future research directions toward the implementation of autonomous and self-powered IoT.