Enabling the Next Generation of Wireless Sensors

Abstract

In this early-stage work, we propose various solutions to enable the next generation of wireless sensors. Our vision is to introduce battery-free wireless sensors that can be deployed ubiquitously. Such sensors would have the ability to both infer the physical environment, and communicate the sensed information wirelessly. In particular, we explore the emerging research directions of ambient and analog RF backscatter for communication, and visible light for sensing. We combine these concepts with energy harvesting to achieve self-powered operation. Furthermore, we introduce novel mechanisms that eliminate sensor-local computational blocks, and instead couple sensors directly to ultra-low power communication modules to transmit sensor information. Our initial results show that we are able to achieve operation of both sensing and communication at a few microwatts of power. Moreover, we can maintain a sufficiently high sensing resolution to enable novel battery-free applications such as hand gesture sensing and intrusion detection.