A taxonomy of energy optimization techniques for smart cities: Architecture and future directions

Abstract There is a drastic increase in urbanization over the past few years, which requires energy‐efficient and optimized solutions for transportation, governance, quality of life in a smart city among all the citizens. The Internet‐of‐Energy (IoE) ecosystem offers many sophisticated and ubiquitous applications for smart cities. The energy demand of IoE applications is increased while IoE devices continue to grow. Therefore, smart city solutions must have the ability to utilize energy and handle the associated challenges efficiently. Moreover, energy Optimization (EO) techniques can be used to reduce energy consumption to meet the sustainability goals in IoE. Different techniques have been proposed for EO in various fields by researchers worldwide. Computing systems also need energy optimization. The energy consumption in the data center, clouds, and blockchain (BC)‐based architectures are a point of concern at the current time. Due to the enormous energy demands of these systems, we cannot take advantage of the latest technologies to their fullest. Due to the emergence of new technologies and some limitations of proposed techniques, we can still not optimize energy usage more than some extent. There is minimal exploration done in energy optimization in BC‐based systems. In this paper, we have proposed a survey on the energy optimization techniques in various systems, including the optimization techniques in BC‐based systems. We have proposed a taxonomy that classifies energy optimization techniques. We have also proposed an energy‐efficient consensus mechanism, Proof‐of‐High Performance optimization (named as PoHPo ), for High‐Performance Computing (HPC) based ecosystems. The open issues and challenges are then discussed in EO. The survey intends to propose future directions for industry professionals, green‐energy stakeholders, and researchers worldwide to explore this topic further.