Abstract
The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) architectures and applications has been the driver for a rapid growth in wireless technologies for the Machine-to-Machine domain. In this context, a crucial role is being played by the so-called Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), a bunch of transmission technologies developed to satisfy three main system requirements: low cost, wide transmission range, and low power consumption. This last requirement is especially crucial as IoT infrastructures should operate for long periods on limited quantities of energy: to cope with this limitation, energy harvesting is being applied every day more frequently, and several different techniques are being tested for LPWAN systems. The aim of this survey paper is to provide a detailed overview of the the existing LPWAN systems relying on energy harvesting for their powering. In this context, the different LPWAN technologies and protocols will be discussed and, for each technology, the applied energy harvesting techniques will be described as well as the architecture of the power management units when present.
Highlights
The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and markets has been the main driver for the emergence of a wide range of innovative data transmission technologies, whose main objective is to satisfy a different set of requirements with respect to the ones typically targeted by human-centered personal communication devices
All the technologies belonging to this family aim at targeting two of the features listed before, i.e., the low power consumption and the large transmission range; while the third requirement, the low cost, it is not explicitly cited in the denomination, it is still fulfilled by every Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) technology as, within the IoT vision, which foresees the presence of billions of interconnected objects all around the world, the low cost of the devices as well as of the connections is intrinsically mandatory to make these technologies employable
The aim of this paper was to provide a comprehensive review of the existing energy harvesting solutions for the powering of LPWAN-based monitoring systems and architectures
Summary
The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and markets has been the main driver for the emergence of a wide range of innovative data transmission technologies, whose main objective is to satisfy a different set of requirements with respect to the ones typically targeted by human-centered personal communication devices. In this sense, while the key features for traditional Internet-based systems are low latency, large bandwidth, and high bit rates, for IoT-based architectures the crucial requirements turn to be low power, low cost, and large transmission ranges. While the most widespread LPWAN technologies currently are Long Range (LoRa), SigFox, and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), a plethora of other solutions can be found on the market, and it is foreseeable that a large number of novel technologies will emerge in the years with the pervasive adoption of IoT systems
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