Powering Long Range Wireless Nodes with Harvested Energy

LPWAN systems are important elements in IoT networks. They allow small amount of data to be efficiently transferred over long distances, reducing the number of gateways. Long range (or improved robustness) often comes at the cost of data rate, meaning that frames require more time and thus more energy to be sent or received. This increase in energy affects the ability of using cost-competitive energy harvesting techniques for LPWAN systems, compared to WPAN systems. In this work, we present a design that uses energy harvested from a relatively small indoor solar panel to power a sensor node and enable data transmission with LoRa. Results from first measurements show that using the module near a window will provide enough energy to measure and transmit hundreds of messages per day. This is more than the amount of messages that can actually be sent per day per node on the public LPWAN network of some telecom operators. Keywords—LPWAN; Booster; Wireless; Power Management; LoRa; Energy Harvesting;