Designing Cost-Effective Battery-Less Energy Harvesting for Intermittent Wireless Communication

Conventional internet of things (IoT) nodes typically rely on batteries, posing challenges due to their periodic replacement. Harvesting energy purely from ambient sources like sunlight offers a solution without using a battery, but it raises considerable challenges for using wireless communication to transmit the collected data solely with limited harvesting power. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective design methodology for a battery-less energy harvesting IoT device, with a focus on enabling efficient wireless communication under intermittent power conditions. To this end, we first develop energy and timing models to optimize the sizes of energy harvesting and short-term energy storage devices, while maximizing the efficiency of data transmission. Then, we introduce a a power management architecture tailored to support better quality of service (QoS) in terms of data transmission rate and communication frequency. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed models and design methodology effectively identify cost-effective energy harvesting IoT configuration, including optimal capacitor size for satisfying the desired wireless communication performance. Moreover, the proposed duty-based dynamic power management (DPM) scheme extends the operation time of IoT nodes by 9.1% to 20.0% and 48.5% to 90.0%, depending on weather conditions throughout the day, while ensuring the minimum required data transfer rate and frequency, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art threshold-based DPM approach.