Practical Issues of Energy Harvesting and Data Transmissions in Sustainable IoT

TL;DR

This paper investigates practical challenges in radio energy harvesting and data communication for sustainable IoT through extensive experiments, proposing a new model to improve energy efficiency and validate it with real device tests.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model for accurately describing energy harvesting and consumption in sustainable IoT devices, validated by real-world experiments.

Findings

The new model closely matches real device performance.

Energy harvesting efficiency varies with system characteristics.

Practical issues like non-linear energy consumption are significant.

Abstract

The sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a promising solution for the green living and smart industries. In this article, we investigate the practical issues in the radio energy harvesting and data communication systems through extensive field experiments. A number of important characteristics of energy harvesting circuits and communication modules have been studied, including the non-linear energy consumption of the communication system relative to the transmission power, the wake-up time associated with the payload, and the varying system power during consecutive packet transmissions. In order to improve the efficiency of energy harvest and energy utilization, we propose a new model to accurately describe the energy harvesting process and the power consumption for sustainable IoT devices. Experiments are performed using commercial IoT devices and RF energy harvesters to verify the accuracy of the proposed model. The experiment results show that the new model matches the performance of sustainable IoT devices very well in the real scenario.