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.
@article{arxiv.2601.17656,
title = {Battery-Free and Gateway-Free Cellular IoT Water Leak Detection System},
author = {Roshan Nepal and Brandon Brown and Shishangbo Yu and Roozbeh Abbasi and Norman Zhou and George Shaker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17656},
year = {2026}
}