Читать книгу Indoor Photovoltaics - Группа авторов - Страница 30

This chapter focuses on micro energy harvesters for indoor applications other than photovoltaics. Some generators are already available commercially. A current challenge for researchers, product designers and customers is their lack of characterization and test standards. The reproducibility and comparability of test results and data sheets remain difficult, if not impossible, without standardized and representative test conditions.

Toxicity, recycling and lifetime are important topics for future energy harvesting systems, especially for IoT applications. The devices might remain in the field for decades, and some might even be forgotten or left installed after their functional life has ended. This needs to be considered during design. The long lifetime also poses a challenge to the security of IoT edge nodes. Such a system needs to protect and secure its data now and in the future, which might be 15 years ahead. So far, security has been neglected in many IoT and comparable systems. In addition, the visible and invisible interconnection of many edge nodes quickly results in giant networks of an accordingly high attack surface [43].

Finally, a common motivation for the installation of IoT devices is the classical idea of Big Data, that is, gathering as much data as possible in order to realize data analytics applications. However, from a statistical point of view, high quality data from a well-planned sample often yield a better result for these applications than an unlimited amount of data of unknown reliability [43, 44]. Thus, the real value gained from the data obtained by an IoT edge node needs to outweigh its cost to security, privacy, operational effort, toxicity, ecological considerations and so forth.