Study of a Battery-less Near Field Communicating Sensor Network with ContactLess Simulator

Abstract

International audienceActive tags and sensor nodes are an important part of the devices involved in the Internet of Things and in some cases it is impossible to power them using standard power supply or even battery. In such a case, battery-less smart sensors are needed. Design this kind of smart system is not an easy task and many different considerations must be taken into account. To face autonomy problems, battery-less sensor is a serious alternative. Energy harvesting is one of the main issue and it is mandatory to simulate the behavior of the system before designing and manufacturing it. In this article, we present ContactLess Simulator (CLS). It is developed in order to simulate contactless powered smart systems such as Near Field Communication (NFC) devices. CLS has been written using visual C# and is thus very flexible and easily portable. More precisely, this article focusses on a battery-less electronic systems: an autonomous NFC smart sensor. To design such a system, the energy budget has to be explored as the central point. CLS was developed exactly for this goal and this article describes a realistic test case to demonstrate it. The test case corresponds to a battery-less sensor node. It is composed of a microcontroller unit, a temperature sensor and a NFC circuit for communication and energy harvesting