English

Batteryless BLE and Light-based IoT Sensor Nodes for Reliable Environmental Sensing

Signal Processing 2025-01-10 v2

Abstract

The sustainable design of Internet of Things (IoT) networks encompasses considerations related to energy efficiency and autonomy as well as considerations related to reliable communications, ensuring no energy is wasted on undelivered data. Under these considerations, this work proposes the design and implementation of energy-efficient Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Light-based IoT (LIoT) batteryless IoT sensor nodes powered by an indoor light Energy Harvesting Unit (EHU). Our design intends to integrate these nodes into a sensing network to improve its reliability by combining both technologies and taking advantage of their features. The nodes incorporate state-of-the-art components, such as low-power sensors and efficient System-on-Chips (SoCs). Moreover, we design a strategy for adaptive switching between active and sleep cycles as a function of the available energy, allowing the IoT nodes to continuously operate without batteries. Our results show that by adapting the duty cycle of the BLE and LIoT nodes depending on the environment's light intensity, we can ensure a continuous and reliable node operation. In particular, measurements show that our proposed BLE and LIoT node designs are able to communicate with an IoT gateway in a bidirectional way, every 19.3 and 624.6 seconds, respectively, in an energy-autonomous and reliable manner.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.17387,
  title  = {Batteryless BLE and Light-based IoT Sensor Nodes for Reliable Environmental Sensing},
  author = {Jimmy Fernandez Landivar and Khojiakbar Botirov and Hazem Sallouha and Marcos Katz and Sofie Pollin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.17387},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC 2024), Valencia, Spain

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:42:28.893Z