Abstract

As of today, large-scale wireless sensor networks are adopted for smart building applications as they are easy and flexible to deploy. Low-power wireless nodes can achieve multi-year lifetimes with an AA battery using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Zig-Bee. However, replacing these batteries at scale is a non-trivial, labor-intensive task. Energy harvesting has emerged as a potential solution to avoid battery replacement but requires compromises such as application specific sensor node design, simplified communication protocol or reduced quality of service. We show the design of a battery-free sensor node using commercial off the shelf components, and present Pible: a Perpetual Indoor BLE sensor node that uses an ambient light energy harvesting system and can support numerous smart building applications. We show trade-offs between node-lifetime, quality of service and light availability and present a predictive algorithm that adapts to changing lighting conditions to maximize node lifetime and application quality of service.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Fraternali2018,
    author = "Fraternali, Francesco and Balaji, Bharathan and Agarwal, Yuvraj and Benini, Luca and Gupta, Rajesh",
    booktitle = "BuildSys 2018 - Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Systems for Built Environments",
    pages = "168--171",
    title = "Pible: Battery-free mote for perpetual indoor BLE applications",
    year = "2018",
    doi = "10.1145/3276774.3282822"
}

Plain Text

Francesco Fraternali, Bharathan Balaji, Yuvraj Agarwal, Luca Benini, and Rajesh Gupta. Pible: battery-free mote for perpetual indoor ble applications. In BuildSys 2018 - Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Systems for Built Environments, 168–171. 2018. doi:10.1145/3276774.3282822.