Development of a self-powered wireless IoT mesh network platform for asset tracking, monitoring and wayfinding applications

Powering the various elements of IoT networks is a major constraint on the scale, installation and maintenance cost and sustainability, as IoT devices are typically either battery or mains-powered. Lightricity already addresses these limitations for the end-nodes (e.g. sensors/tracker tags), using its world-leading efficiency indoor photovoltaic technology to harvest energy from indoor and ambient lighting.

This avoids the cost and inconvenience of ever having to change a battery, and the environmental impact of massive battery waste. Lightricity broadcast-only BLE-based tags/sensors are generally used in star topology IoT networks, where every tag communicates directly with a fixed (wired) gateway device receiving and passing data it to the backend (Cloud) for analytics.

Gateways, however, are too power-hungry for harvested light energy. With typical BLE tags network range is limited by tag broadcast range, necessitating a gateway in every room, implying very large gateway numbers (many 100-1,000's) for big buildings e.g. airports, hospitals, warehouses, exhibition centres.

Mesh networking topology addresses the cost, inconvenience and easy scalability of networks by adding battery-powered relays/anchors to massively reduce the need for gateways. These relays receive and send data from end-nodes and route network data optimally to a single or small number of gateways per building. They still require significantly more power than end-nodes.

However, with recent improvements in mesh technology and a series of innovations we propose in this project, particularly to improve light capture, powering them with harvested light energy is now within reach. This project will make the vast majority of a mesh IoT network's infrastructure independent of battery or mains power thus achieving low cost, sustainable scalability.

This proposed industrial stage R&D project aims to develop prototype light energy harvesting-powered BLE-based Wirepas Mesh relays and bidirectional sensor end-nodes. Crowd Connected will test the resulting devices in real environments that challenge the performance limits.