And even 15-year-old smartphones feature potent CPUs and fast operating memory, which enables them to comfortably outperform popular IoT-specific devices such as the single-board Raspberry Pi computer, according to Flores—especially when made to work together. These smartphone-based data-centers can run image recognition algorithms, host websites, or crunch company data. Reusing old smartphones in this way could thus help reduce the cost of IoT projects but also tackle the ballooning problem of e-waste.
“Smartphones are really well designed for high-energy processing,” says Huber Flores, an associate professor of pervasive computing at the University of Tartu in Estonia. “They are also very well optimized to not overheat and are very efficient in handling heavy data processing applications.” Flores and his colleagues published their results in an early access paper published in IEEE Pervasive Computing.