Symbol-Synchronous Communication for Ultra-Low-Power Multi-Hop Ambient IoT Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a symbol-synchronous communication protocol for ultra-low-power ambient IoT networks, enabling battery-less multi-hop connectivity with reduced energy consumption and high reliability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel symbol-synchronous protocol that allows ad-hoc, energy-harvesting relay nodes to participate without synchronization, improving efficiency over existing multi-hop protocols.

Findings

Achieves below 1% packet error rate in 400-node network

Reduces relay node energy consumption by 88%

Ensures high reliability with minimal duty cycle

Abstract

Ambient Internet of Things (A-IoT) devices, as a critical enabler of future green IoT networks, have attracted broad interest from both industry and academia due to their ability to operate without batteries and with low maintenance costs. To accommodate their dynamic and constrained energy budget, an ultra-low-power connectivity protocol is required. Due to the severely limited transmit power of A-IoT devices, multi-hop connectivity is an interesting paradigm to extend their range. However, commonly used protocols for multi-hop communication may not be suitable for A-IoT due to excessive overhead related to channel access procedures, coordinated routing, and tight time synchronization requirements. This paper presents a novel network connectivity protocol based on symbol-synchronous transmissions, which allows battery-less relay nodes to participate in the forwarding process in an ad-hoc manner, without the need for synchronization or coordination. This allows them to adapt their duty cycle to the available harvested energy. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can ensure high reliability in data packet delivery while significantly reducing the energy consumption of each relay node. We also investigate the relationship between wake-up probability and network density. For example, a 400-node network in a 625 m2 area can achieve a packet error rate below 1 % with an average awake time of 6 % per node, achieving an energy consumption reduction of 88 % compared to the baseline approach.