Powering the Environmental Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a constantly-evolving area of research and touches almost every aspect of life in the modern world. As technology moves forward, it is becoming increasingly important for these IoT devices for environmental sensing to become self-powered to enable long-term operation. This paper provides an outlook on the current state-of-the-art in terms of energy harvesting for these low-power devices. An analytical approach is taken, first defining types of environments in which energy-harvesters operate, before exploring both well-known and novel energy harvesting techniques and their uses in modern-day sensing.