Smart home gateway system over Bluetooth low energy with wireless energy transfer capability

Abstract

As billions of sensors and smart meters connect to the Internet of Things (IoT), current wireless technologies are taking decisive steps to ensure their sustainable operation. One popular IoT scenario features a smart home service gateway, which becomes the central point of user’s home environment facilitating a multitude of tasks. Given that most IoT devices connected to residential gateway are small-scale and battery-powered, the key challenge is to extend their lifetime without recharging/replacing batteries. To this end, a novel radio technology named Bluetooth low energy (BLE) has recently been completed to enable energy-efficient data transfer. Another inspiring innovation is the capability of sensors to harvest wireless energy in their local environment. In this work, we envision a scenario where many in-home sensors are communicating with a smart gateway over the BLE protocol, while at the same time harvesting RF energy transmitted from the gateway wirelessly via a dedicated radio interface. We thoroughly investigate performance limitations of such wireless energy transfer interface (WETI) with dynamic analytical model and with important practical considerations. Our methodology delivers the upper bound on WETI operation coupled with BLE-based communication, which characterizes ultimate system performance over the class of practical radio and energy resource management algorithms.