Fast Inventory for 3GPP Ambient IoT Considering Device Unavailability due to Energy Harvesting

TL;DR

This paper proposes methods to significantly reduce inventory time in ambient IoT systems with energy harvesting devices, achieving up to 83% faster completion by addressing device unavailability issues.

Contribution

It introduces novel solutions like duty cycled monitoring, device grouping, and low-power receiving chains to improve inventory efficiency in energy-harvesting ambient IoT devices.

Findings

Inventory time reduced by up to 83%

Proposed methods effectively handle device unavailability

Significant improvements in inventory speed for large device sets

Abstract

With the growing demand for massive internet of things (IoT), new IoT technology, namely ambient IoT (A-IoT), has been studied in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). A-IoT devices are batteryless and consume ultra-low power, relying on energy harvesting and energy storage to capture a small amount of energy for communication. A promising usecase of A-IoT is inventory, where a reader communicates with hundreds of A-IoT devices to identify them. However, energy harvesting required before communication can significantly delay or even fail inventory completion. In this work, solutions including duty cycled monitoring (DCM), device grouping and low-power receiving chain are proposed. Evaluation results show that the time required for a reader to complete an inventory procedure for hundreds of A-IoT devices can be reduced by 50% to 83% with the proposed methods.