Design and Implementation of a Sustainable Light-based IoT Node on a System-on-Chip

The concept of the Light-based Internet of Things (LIoT) describes nodes that use light both to harvest energy to operate and to support full-duplex wireless communication. In this study, we investigate the design and implementation of a LIoT node using low power System-on-Chip based boards. The selection of the boards was carried out following performance and power consumption criteria. Benchmark tests included computational power and speed of executing I/O tasks, which are considered key performance metrics. The design considered the use of key components exploiting printed electronics (PE) technology to create a sustainable node solution. In the research, printed photovoltaic cells are used to harvest energy. However, the use of printed components poses some challenges, as the performance of these components is typically inferior to that of conventional components. Since the LIoT nodes are energy-limited, managing node energy is crucial to achieving energy autonomy. Thus, one of the main selections metric for the implementation of technology was the evaluation of power consumption during sleep modes. The paper discusses system architecture and design of the functionalities and provides a comparison between different System-on-Chip (SoC) based implementation platforms. The paper finally selects the most suitable SoC-based platform to implement a sustainable LIoT node supporting  duplex communication operation.