Viability Bounds of M2M Communication using Energy-Harvesting and Passive Wake-up Radio

Techniques for wireless energy harvesting (WEH) are being emerged as a fascinating set of solutions to extend the lifetime of energy-constrained wireless networks. They are commonly regarded as a key functional technique for almost perpetual communications. With the WEH technology, wireless devices are able to harvest energy from, e.g., different light sources or RF signals broadcast by ambient/dedicated wireless transmitters to support their operation and communications capabilities. The WEH technology will have increasingly wider range of use in upcoming applications for, e.g., wireless sensor networks, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, and the Internet of Things. In this paper, the usability and fundamental limits of solar cell or photovoltaic harvesting based M2M communication systems are studied and presented. The derived theoretical bounds are in essence based on the Shannon capacity theorem, combined with selected propagation loss models, assumed additional link nonidealities, as well as the given energy harvesting and storage capabilities. Fundamental performance limits and available capacity of the communicating link are derived and analyzed, together with extensive numerical results evaluated in different practical scenarios, including realistic implementation losses and state-of-the-art printed supercapacitor performances. In particular, low power sensor type communication applications using passive wake-up radio (WuR) assisted operation are addressed in the study. The results show the benefits of using passive WuR, especially when the number of nodes is small. Moreover, the presented analysis principles and results establish clear feasibility regions and performance bounds for wireless energy harvesting based low rate M2M communications in the future IoT networks.