PhD Forum Abstract: Energy Harvesting based Sensing for the Batteryless IoT
Muhammad Moid Sandhu · 2020
Sensor nodes in conventional Internet-of-Things (IoT) suffer from the limitation of finite energy storage capacity of batteries, which hinders their pervasive deployment. Energy harvesters offer a promising solution to this issue by converting the environmental energy into electrical energy to power sensor nodes. Recently, energy harvesters have been employed as sensors for activity/context detection or source of energy separately. The harvested energy signal contains embedded information about the underlying physical conditions and thus can be used to detect activities in various applications. In this study, we implement Kinetic Energy Harvesters (KEHs) as context sensors and source of energy simultaneously, to detect the underlying activity and to power sensor nodes in IoT. This results in full utilisation of energy harvesters in practical environments, leading towards autonomous and perpetual operation of sensor nodes in the batteryless IoT.