Abstract
Most smart meters are connected and powered by the electric mains, requiring the service interruption and qualified personnel for their installation. Wireless technologies and energy harvesting techniques have been proved as alternatives for communications and power supply, respectively. In this work, we analyse the energy consumption of the most used IoT wireless technologies nowadays: Sigfox, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, Wi-Fi, BLE. Smart meters’ energy consumption accounts for metering, standby and communication processes. Experimental measurements show that communication consumption may vary upon the specific characteristics of each wireless communication technology—payload, connection establishment, transmission time. Results show that the selection of a specific technology will depend on the application requirements (message payload, metering period) and location constraints (communication range, infrastructure availability). Besides, we compare the performance of the most suitable energy harvesting (EH) techniques for smart meters: photovoltaic (PV), radiofrequency (RF) and magnetic induction (MIEH). Thus, EH technique selection will depend on the availability of each source at the smart meter’s location. The most appropriate combination of IoT wireless technology and EH technique must be selected accordingly to the very use case requirements and constraints.
Highlights
In the last few years, the number of IoT devices has grown significantly, so does the spending in IoT-related fields, which is expected to increase by 24% in 2021 [1]
We focus on smart meters with different energy harvesting (EH) sources and wireless technologies— it might be extrapolated to any kind of indoor sensor
Feasibility of autonomous indoor IoT smart meters is mainly restricted by the limitations on the ambient energy available to harvest
Summary
In the last few years, the number of IoT devices has grown significantly, so does the spending in IoT-related fields, which is expected to increase by 24% in 2021 [1]. The global IoT market will be worth more than 1200 billion (×109) euros by 2027 [2]. IoT devices may be used for a wide range of applications: healthcare, ambient conditions monitoring, workout tracking, infrastructures monitoring, failure prevention, smart metering, etc. The latter is the one we focus on in this work. Following our research presented in [5], in which an autonomous Sigfox smart meter was presented, in this paper, we analyse the feasibility of indoor IoT nodes. We focus on smart meters with different energy harvesting (EH) sources and wireless technologies— it might be extrapolated to any kind of indoor sensor
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