Lightweight IoT Architectures for Integrated Smart Waste and Smart Sewage Monitoring in Smart Cities: A Systematic Literature Review

Vishesh Sharma, Kuldeep Chauhan

Abstract: The rapid growth of smart city initiatives has increased the need for intelligent, scalable, and energy-efficient environmental monitoring systems capable of improving municipal services and supporting sustainable urban development. Smart waste management and smart sewage monitoring are critical application areas where Internet of Things (IoT) technologies enable real-time sensing, remote monitoring, and data-driven decision-making. This paper presents a systematic literature review of lightweight IoT architectures for integrated smart waste and smart sewage monitoring systems. The review analyzes recent advancements in embedded hardware platforms, communication protocols, edge-fog-cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies including TinyML, Federated Learning, Digital Twins, and Green IoT. The findings reveal that although existing solutions demonstrate significant improvements in monitoring efficiency, many remain application-specific and face challenges related to interoperability, scalability, energy management, cybersecurity, and large-scale deployment. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a conceptual unified lightweight IoT architecture that integrates sensing, embedded processing, communication, distributed computing, cloud services, and intelligent analytics within a modular framework. The proposed architecture aims to enhance resource utilization, reduce cloud dependency, support heterogeneous devices, and enable future smart city integration. A qualitative evaluation demonstrates the potential advantages of the framework while highlighting the need for experimental validation through prototype implementation and real-world deployment. This review provides insights into current trends, research gaps, and future directions for developing sustainable, intelligent, and interoperable IoT-enabled environmental monitoring systems.

Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), Lightweight IoT Architecture, Smart Waste Management, Smart Sewage Monitoring, Edge Computing, MQTT, TinyML, Smart Cities