Battery-Free and Gateway-Free Cellular IoT Water Leak Detection System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a battery-free, gateway-free water leak detection system that uses energy harvesting and LTE-M communication for autonomous, scalable IoT monitoring of water leaks.

Contribution

It presents a novel energy harvesting-based architecture enabling direct LTE-M communication without batteries or gateways, suitable for sustainable IoT applications.

Findings

Successful LTE-M beacon transmissions triggered by water energy generation

Demonstrated autonomous operation without batteries or local network infrastructure

Potential for scalable, maintenance-free water leak detection in smart infrastructure

Abstract

This paper presents a battery-free and gateway-free water leak detection system capable of direct communication over LTE-M (Cat-M1). The system operates solely on energy harvested through a hydroelectric mechanism driven by an electrochemical sensor, thereby removing the need for conventional batteries. To address the stringent startup and operational power demands of LTE-M transceivers, the architecture incorporates a compartmentalized sensing module and a dedicated power management subsystem, comprising a boost converter, supercapacitor based energy storage, and a hysteresis controlled load isolation circuit. This design enables autonomous, direct to cloud data transmission without reliance on local networking infrastructure. Experimental results demonstrate consistent LTE-M beacon transmissions triggered by water induced energy generation, underscoring the system's potential for sustainable, maintenance free, and globally scalable IoT leak detection applications in smart infrastructure.