Energy-Efficient IoT Sensor Design: A Comprehensive Review of Sensor Technologies, Power Consumption, and Sustainable Deployment
Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) systems depend on distributed sensors to observe physical, environmental, and operational conditions and convert those observations into actionable digital information. Although sensing capability has expanded rapidly, energy availability remains a major constraint for battery-powered and remotely deployed devices. This review examines IoT sensor technologies from an energy-efficiency perspective, linking sensor characteristics, measurement requirements, processing, wireless communication, power-management strategies, and environmental integration. The paper consolidates a practical taxonomy of temperature, humidity, pressure, motion, proximity, light, acceleration, positioning, gas, and sound sensors and discusses representative devices and indicative energy requirements. It further examines the main sources of energy consumption, including sensing, computation, communication, idle operation, environmental effects, and power-conversion overhead. A structured framework is proposed for energy-efficient sensor design based on application requirements, low-power hardware, adaptive sensing, local processing, communication optimization, energy harvesting, and continuous power profiling. Special attention is given to duty cycling, adaptive sampling, data aggregation, compression, edge computing, low-power wireless technologies, and energy harvesting. The review also discusses the relationship between energy consumption, battery lifetime, operational expenditure, reliability, scalability, and sustainability. Finally, challenges and emerging directions including context-aware sensing, machine-learning-assisted energy management, secure low-power operation, and sustainable environmental monitoring are identified. The paper is intended to support researchers, system designers, and practitioners in selecting sensors and designing IoT architectures that balance measurement quality, responsiveness, network lifetime, and energy sustainability.