Practical Issues of RF Energy Harvest and Data Transmission in Renewable Radio Energy Powered IoT
Yu Luo, Lina Pu
Abstract
The sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a promising solution for green living and smart industries. In this article, we investigate the practical issues in radio energy harvesting and data communication systems through extensive field experiments. A number of important features of energy harvesting circuits and communication modules, including the nonlinear energy consumption of the communication system relative to the transmission power, the wake-up time associated with the payload, and the system power reduction during continuous data transmission, have been studied. In order to improve the efficiency of energy harvesting and energy utilization, we propose a new model to accurately describe the energy harvesting process and the power consumption for sustainable IoT devices. Experiments were conducted using commercial RF transceivers and RF energy harvesters to verify the accuracy of the proposed model. The experiment results show that the new model matches the performance of sustainable IoT devices well in real scenarios.