28 January 2022

ICT, Connect the World.

Information and communications technology (ICT) is a rapidly growing field. The incorporation of new cyber-physical system technologies into future smart city applications may have noticeable impacts on the environment, which may be either beneficial or harmful. This chapter discusses how cyber-physical systems (CPSs) impact the environment, the role of green CPS, relevant applications in this field, and how to further improve these systems aiming at a more environmentally friendly coexistence. Most energy today is generated by nonrenewable sources, which, to different extents, cannot ensure sustainability within societal development. It has been reported that ICT infrastructure and systems are critical energy consumers, as they consume about 2–5% of the world’s energy, which will keep increasing as cyber-physical-system-based technologies become more ubiquitous. It is clear that one of the key factors in reducing the negative impact of ICT on the environment is to reduce energy consumption. Since there are various techniques toward this objective, this chapter makes a survey on some relevant proposals. There have been a number of works oriented to power savings for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in cellular networks. There have been other works discussing how to reduce energy consumption under large-scale-equipment architectures, such as those installed by telecommunication operators. There has been also some work that describes the use of small, inexpensive, resource-constrained devices with pervasive computing capabilities to deploy an ubiquitous energy control system. Besides applications and technologies that reduce energy consumption, there are also cases where CPS directly improve the impact on the environment. Some of these cases include the monitoring of forests and plantation, the automation of vegetation care through an Internet of Things (IoT) network, and using IoT in green agricultural products supply chain management. In summary, better ICT technology designs can have a significant positive impact on the environment and they can achieve this in different ways, e.g., aiding the detection of pollutants or reducing energy consumption, which would result in more stable ecology systems.