On the prediction of battery powered IoT devices lifetime

A method to estimate the lifetime of battery powered Internet of Things devices is presented in this paper. The method is particularly helpful while developing or tuning the device hardware and firmware targeting a given battery pack. Also, it can be handy when predicting the device lifetime using a different battery pack than the one it was designed to work with. The proposed method relies on the device power profiling together with a battery model to provide an estimate of the percentual charge drop caused by each performed task. The daily battery drop, and ultimately the battery lifetime, are estimated using the model results and prior information for the use case. Illustrative results for an IoT device performing Wi-Fi based geolocation communicating over a Low Power Wide Area Network while being power using alkaline batteries are given.