Green IoT design is an IoT design paradigm based on a holistic IoT design framework that focuses on maintaining a balanced trade-off between the functional requirements, Quality of Service (QoS), interoperability, Cost, security, and sustainability within the IoT ecosystem. It emphasises the need to prioritise energy efficiency and the reduction of waste in the IoT ecosystem from manufacturing IoT devices, deployment of IoT systems and operation of IoT systems.

The emergence of modern technologies such as Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks, blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), fog/cloud computing are unlocking new IoT use cases in various industries and sectors of the modern technology-driven economy or society. As a result, the number of IoT devices connected to the Internet and the volume of traffic generated from IoT infrastructures will increase significantly, increasing the energy demand in the IoT ecosystem. The result is an increase in the carbon footprint and e-waste (especially from battery-powered IoT devices) from IoT related services or from the IoT ecosystem.

An effective green IoT strategy should span the entire IoT product lifecycle from the design to production (manufacturing) to the deployment, to operations and maintenance, and to the recycling. The primary goal in each of these stages is to reduce energy consumption, adopt the use of sustainable resources (e.g., arvesting energy from sustainable energy sources, using sustainable materials), minimising e-waste and other pollutants, and adopt recycling of resource or waste. Therefore, a shift toward Green IoT (GIoT) emphasises on the need to adopt energy-efficient practices and processes that prioritises the resource conservation, reduction of waste, and environmental sustainability ^[1]

Green IoT design are choices that are made or implemented during the design process of IoT systems to reduce the environmental impact from the massive deplyment of IoT systems. They are energy-efficient strategies devised to reduce the carbon footprint from manufacturing, deploying, and operating IoT systems (IoT sensor device, networking nodes, data centre or computing device). They are also strategies devised to reduce the waste from IoT infrastructures. They may involve hardware, software, management or policy decisions. Green IoT is basically the effective and efficient methods to design, manufacture, use, and dispose IoT components with minimal damage to the environments ^[2].

Reducing the energy consumption from the operation of IoT systems

Reducing the amount of waste created from the deployment and operation of IoT systems (effecient maintenance, re-use, recycling).

Designing of IoT hardware, software, management systems, and policies considering the requirement of minimising the energy consumption, carbon footprint and the environmental impact of IoT systems. One of the design goal should be to implement energy-efficient stratgies to reduce energy consumption and to develope stratgies to minimise the amount of e-waste produce from the IoT systems and infratuctures. Green IoT design techniques includes: Green hardware, green communication and networking infrastructure, green software, green architecture, green software, energy-efficient security mechanisms, and energy harvesting.

Energy-efficient manufactring infrastructure for IoT hardware. With the expectation to connect hundreds of billions or trillion of IoT devices to satisfy the demand for IoT to improve various sectors or industries on the evolving tech-driven economy, the carbon footprint from factories manufacturing IoT devices will be enormous. Also, the manufactured for IoT systems should also be energy efficient.