Energy Consumption of IoT Monitoring Software Architectures in the Edge

Abstract

IoT has led energy consumption to be a critical issue for sustainability due to the huge amount of power connections of IoT devices and the huge amount of generated data that must be transmitted and stored. As a result, the data monitoring process and its processing activities must be performed by the nodes and servers of the Edge in a sustainable way. The IoT monitoring process of data consists of four main activities: listening, filtering, translating and routing. Once the data has been monitored, it can be stored and transmitted to the Edge/Cloud. In order to address sustainable monitoring processes in the Edge, it is necessary to evaluate how the configuration of the components that compose the Edge monitoring architecture may influence its energy consumption. In this paper, we present the experimental results of an exploratory study and its findings, in which the energy consumption of four different software architecture configurations of an indoor environmental monitoring IoT system is measured. From the execution of 24 experiments, the study reveals the importance of balancing the monitoring activities between the Edge nodes and servers, and evidences the energy consumption increment that data storage implies for the Edge.