The State of Battery-Less Radio: A System Perspective Across Diverse Wireless IoT Standards

The quest for truly maintenance-free Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices necessitates the elimination of the battery, leading to the emergence of Battery-Less Radio systems. This presentation adopts a system-focused approach, moving beyond component-level achievements to analyze the full architecture of Battery-Less Radio deployment. We begin with a rigorous examination of real-world use cases that require perpetual operation, followed by analysis of feasibility based on available energy harvesting sources and practical power models. A key challenge for Battery-Less Radio is reconciling the high power draw of main communications with intermittent harvested energy. This talk addresses this via a detailed discussion of the Wake Up Receiver (WUR) assist architecture. The WUR, acting as an ultra-low-power sentinel radio, minimizes the main radio’s duty cycle. We analyze the specific system and RF circuit requirements for both the WUR and the main radio to support communication across diverse standards, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, and 4G/5G/6G Cellular IoT. The talk will summarize the minimum performance benchmarks required for the WUR and the main radio needed for reliable, battery-less connectivity. This comprehensive system view provides a roadmap for future hardware and protocol innovations in the Battery-Less Radio space.