Compiled by: iot101
Author:Daniel Barnes
IoT Think Tank Compilation
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If I told you that a battery must last for 1 month, 6 months, 2 years, or even 5 years without charging or replacing, would that sound crazy? Who would demand a wearable device to last so long without charging? Yet, there are many such application scenarios in the industrial Internet.
We technical personnel have almost solved all the Internet-related issues, so we have become quite bored. You know, when a group of techies gets bored, they tend to seek another difficult problem to solve.
Entering the world of the Internet of Things, we realized that the network has not yet conquered those things that truly matter to us—the real world that we interact with every day. Now, a series of challenges can at least keep us techies busy for the next decade.
I believe the main challenge facing the Internet of Things in the real world is not rooted in inter-networking, but in how to drive things to affect network interconnection and software programming, especially in wireless scenarios.
Batteries and the Internet of Things
It is evident that rechargeable batteries have propelled the development of consumer-facing IoT.
The iPhone needs to charge for several hours a day to connect to cellular networks or WiFi and access the Internet through TCP/IP protocols, which does not seem to significantly change networking or programming methods. Fitbit communicates with other devices via Bluetooth and only needs to charge for a few minutes each day, which has a dramatic impact on networking and software programming models.
But what if I told you that a battery must last for 1 month, 6 months, 2 years, or even 5 years without charging or replacing? Is that crazy? Who would demand a wearable device to last so long without charging?
Consider these very realistic industrial IoT applications: monitoring soil and disease conditions in almond orchards, monitoring the health of dairy cows, predictive maintenance of air compressors in factories, including monitoring cranes, engine performance, or fire extinguisher monitoring as part of over-the-top services. In these scenarios, the environment where the devices are located requires more than 6 months (in some cases, 5 years) without connecting to a power source.
By the way, over-the-top services as a business model are quite interesting. Traditional companies that sell cranes, fire extinguishers, and vehicles expect their products to be smarter and connected for more service revenue or closer customer relationships. However, they want to install their products without disturbing existing infrastructure, which means that entire categories of industrial goods need longer battery life.
How to Extend Your Battery Life
Buying a larger battery is certainly one way, but it’s usually impractical and not cost-effective. More design approaches can be summarized in the following three aspects:
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Use low-power processors with advanced sleep control mechanisms
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Use low-power RF technology that can precisely control TX/RX (transmit/receive) times
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Control the power consumption of sensor and actuator peripherals
In other words, read sensor data and send messages for as long as possible in low-power mode, then turn off all devices. This is about managing the battery’s duty cycle (the proportion of time the power is on during a pulse cycle).
What to Trade Off?
Of course, the first principle of engineering is that if you want something, you have to give up something else. There is always a trade-off—in this case, long battery life must be exchanged for traditional networking and software programming methods.
WiFi and TCP/IP really can’t help you manage battery duty cycles well. WiFi requires time to lock onto access points, and TCP needs to establish a connection with a handshake protocol before sending data, along with protocol overhead to ensure reliability. All these processes consume precious RF and processor time, and the time is not spent on transmitting data but on establishing connections and reliability.
You might consider using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) as an alternative, but it still wastes time and cannot guarantee reliability.
Some alternative network solutions that can shorten the “ON” duty cycle include:
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Fire and forget: If reliability is not a big issue, this is the choice to minimize power consumption.
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Time synchronized transmission: Avoid conflicts.
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A backbone of powered repeaters to relay messages: Reliability between battery-powered nodes and powered nodes costs less time.
Implementing these solutions and other non-traditional networking approaches means that there must be other solutions to ensure reliability. The good news is that there are emerging standards at the physical, connection, and network layers to manage these things, but don’t expect them to work like the methods we’re used to. In the future, there will need to be additional tools and algorithms to reliably collect data.
Traditional operating systems neither support fast sleep/wake cycles nor handle limited RAM & flash memory. The decision logic of things will be driven by embedded software and major events: a programming paradigm unfamiliar to traditional IT developers.
The bottom line is that a significant portion of “things” in the industrial IoT requires batteries, and these batteries need to have long life so that reliable networking and programming require outstanding expertise.
The question is not how to drive an IoT platform, but how an IoT platform should easily extend battery life through some means, right?
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