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100 Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Fig. 2.34 Power consumption requirements for different devices.
an order of 100 in power consumption at same level of computation. Allowing
for a 10 fold increase in IoT computation, power consumption should still be
reduced by an order of 10. An example of power consumption requirements
for different devices is given in Figure 2.34.
On the other hand, energy harvesting techniques have been explored to
respond to the energy consumption requirements of the IoT domain. For vibration
energy harvesters, we expect them to have higher power densities in the
future (from 10 μW/g to 30 μW/g) and to work on a wider frequency bandwidth.
A roadmap of vibration energy harvesters is provided in Figure 2.36.
Actually, the goal of vibration energy harvesters’ researchers is to develop
Plug and Play (PnP) devices, able to work in any vibrating environment,
within 10 years. In the same time, we expect basic functions’ energy consumption
to decrease by at least a factor of 10. All these progresses will
allow vibration energy harvesters to attract new markets, from industry to
healthcare or defence.
The main challenge for thermoelectric solutions is to increase thermoelectric
materials’ intrinsic efficiency, in order to convert a higher part of the
few mW of thermal energy available. This efficiency improvement will be