Energy-efficient system design for IoT devices

It is projected that, within the coming decade, there will be more than 50 billion smart objects connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). These smart objects, which connect the physical world with the world of computing infrastructure, are expected to pervade all aspects of our daily lives and revolutionize a number of application domains such as healthcare, energy conservation, transportation, etc. In this paper, we present an overview of the challenges involved in designing energy-efficient IoT edge devices and describe recent research that has proposed promising solutions to address these challenges. First, we outline the challenges involved in efficiently supplying power to an IoT device. Next, we discuss the role of emerging memory technologies in making IoT devices energy-efficient. Finally, we discuss the potential impact that approximate computing can have in increasing the energy-efficiency of wearables and other compute-intensive IoT devices.

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