Energy-Autonomous Wireless Communication for Millimeter-Scale Internet-of-Things Sensor Nodes

Abstract

This paper presents an energy-autonomous wireless communication system for ultra-small Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms. In the proposed system, all necessary components, including the battery, energy-harvesting solar cells, and the RF antenna, are fully integrated within a millimeter-scale form factor. Designing an energy-optimized wireless communication system for such a miniaturized platform is challenging because of unique system constraints imposed by the ultra-small system dimension. The proposed system targets orders of magnitude improvement in wireless communication energy efficiency through a comprehensive system-level analysis that jointly optimizes various system parameters, such as node dimension, modulation scheme, synchronization protocol, RF/analog/digital circuit specifications, carrier frequency, and a miniaturized 3-D antenna. We propose a new protocol and modulation schemes that are specifically designed for energy-scarce ultra-small IoT nodes. These new schemes exploit abundant signal processing resources on gateway devices to simplify design for energy-scarce ultra-small sensor nodes. The proposed dynamic link adaptation guarantees that the ultra-small IoT node always operates in the most energy efficient mode for a given operating scenario. The outcome is a truly energy-optimized wireless communication system to enable various classes of new applications, such as implanted smart-dust devices.