Energy Cooperation for Sustainable IoT Services within Smart Cities

In this paper, we consider energy cooperation in an Internet of Things (IoT) smart city scenario. We assume the presence of interconnecting energy harvesting IoT gateways (GWs), that are endowed with energy harvesting capabilities and whose role is to collect and aggregate data from field sensing devices. Energy cooperation complements and balances the energetic needs to those devices that are neither connected to the power grid, nor satisfactorily served by energy harvesting due to the instability of ambient energy arrivals. The proposed solution entail energy transfers from energy rich gateways to energy scarce ones, i.e., those which are not connected to the power grid. To identify the optimal energy transfer/allocation scheme, we formulate a convex optimization problem that finds the optimal solution for heterogeneous smart systems. With this energy allocation technique, the gateways are unlikely to run out of energy during operation and the gap between energy offer and demand among interconnected gateways is kept to a minimum. We also quantify the performance of the proposed energy transfer policies as a function of network parameters, including: the amount of traffic generated by sensing devices, the number of smart services in the system, and the number of gateways that are connected to the power grid.