Design and Implementation of A Batteryless Wireless Embedded System for IoT Applications

With the increasing popularity of embedded systems that consist of identifying, sensing, processing, and communication capabilities, the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled many new application scenarios in diverse scientific fields and provided an important opportunity to build efficient industrial systems and applications. Most embedded systems consume power provided by fixed batteries with limited capacity. However, the main disadvantage of batteries is that they must be periodically replaced with new ones or recharged when they are depleted. This kind of maintenance process increases the cost and restricts the use in inaccessible places. Considering the limitations of battery power, alternative energy sources are required for interconnected devices to operate efficiently and effectively. Harvesting or scavenging energy from the environment is an important strategy to design self-powered systems employed in the IoT domain. Traditional energy harvesting applications use large energy storage devices to supply the power to the system whenever needed. Batteryless energy harvesting techniques have advantages to operate long periods of time without maintenance. In this study, we designed and implemented a supercapacitor-based, solar-powered wireless embedded system that can operate autonomously without the need of maintenance and battery replacement. Our goal is to explore and analyze the applicability and usefulness of batteryless wireless data communication and self-powered smart devices using energy harvesting technique in the IoT environment. In our experiments, we observed that our prototype boards operate well with low-power consumption without any performance degradation.

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