Suitability of Communication Technologies for Harvester-Powered IoT-Nodes

The Internet of Things introduces Internet connectivity to things and objects in the physical world and thus enables them to communicate with other nodes via the Internet directly. This enables new applications that for example allow seamless process monitoring and control in industrial environments. One core requirement is that the nodes involved in the network have a long system lifetime, despite limited access to the power grid and potentially difficult propagation conditions. Energy harvesting can provide the required energy for this long lifetime if the node is able to send the data based on the available energy budget. In this paper, we therefore analyze and evaluate which common IoT communication technologies are suitable for nodes powered by energy harvesters. The comparison includes three different constraints from different energy sources and harvesting technologies besides several communication technologies. Besides identifying possible technologies in general, we evaluate the impact of duty-cycling and different data sizes. The results in this paper give a road map for combining energy harvesting technology with IoT communication technology to design industrial sensor nodes.