EAI MobiQuitous 2023 - 20th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, Date: 2023/11/14 - 2023/11/17, Location: Melbourne, Australia
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
Author:
Keywords:
Battery-free, Energy harvesting, IoT development boards, Plug-and-play power supply, Self-adaptive power management, C3/20/014#55753804, C3/21/011#56343071
Abstract:
Nowadays, most Internet of Things (IoT) devices still operate on batteries, offering lifetimes of just a few years; leading to high maintenance costs and excess waste. Energy Harvesting (EH) in combination with super-capacitor charge storage offers a solution, however, it is considered complex and unreliable, hampering its real-world deployment. To address this problem, we contribute Flute, a power management system for building battery-free IoT deployments. Unlike prior work, Flute focuses on transforming existing IoT development boards into battery-free devices. Reliable operation is achieved through a combination of generic power management hardware and self-adaptive software enabling sustainable operation in the face of dynamic power supply and demand. We evaluate our approach through a series of diverse one-week solar EH scenarios and show that Flute efficiently harvests energy and achieves reliable operation for a range of unmodified IoT development boards using LTE-M and LoRa. Hence, Flute provides a promising foundation for building a battery-free and EH ecosystem for the Internet of Things.