Prototype Implementation and Experimental Evaluation for LoRa-Backscatter Communication Systems With RF Energy Harvesting and Low Power Management

Battery free Internet of Things (BF IoT), which is realized by harvesting ambient energy to power the IoT devices, has many advantages such as low power, low cost, free-maintenance, easy deployment, and environmental protection. As the two key enabling technologies of BF IoT, the integration of energy harvesting, management and backscatter communication (BackCom) is expected to meet practical applications. However, several fundamental issues need to be addressed to fully develop the potential of such integration. In this paper, we propose an ultra-low power energy harvesting and management scheme that effectively reduces the startup and quiescent power consumption. In the case of extremely limited energy harvested, the Long Range (LoRa) BackCom digital waveform generation algorithm with ultra-low power consumption and low complexity is studied, which can support low-power and low-cost micro-controllers (MCUs). Then, a radio frequency (RF) front-end scheme that is compatible with RF energy harvesting (RFEH), BackCom, and On-Off-Keying (OOK) receiving is proposed. On this basis, we design and implement a fully functional BF LoRa Tag, which integrates tag antennas, LoRa BackCom, low-power OOK receiving, multi-parameter real-time sensing, RFEH and management, at a cost of only 6. Our test results show that the BF LoRa Tag can be self-powered by harvesting the RF energy as low as –19 dBm, with the cold-start power as low as 280 nW, the quiescent power as low as 49 nW, the OOK receiving power consumption as low as $1.74~\mu $ W, the LoRa BackCom power consumption of only $251~\mu $ W, and the communication distance up to 445 meters. Compared with the prototypes in existing literature, the BF LoRa Tag not only has lower power consumption, wider coverage, and the lowest cost, but also has complete system functions. Finally, we discuss the reciprocity between stations and receivers, as well as the BF LoRa cellular communication network, which provides useful references for the practical application and large-scale deployment of BF IoT in the future.