RF and Microwave Technology Challenges for Internet-of-Things
Applications
L. Larson
Brown University, School of Engineering, Providence, RI 02912
Abstract—An overview is provided of RF and microwave
technology challenges for Internet-of-Things applications. In
addition to traditional ultra-low power radio requirements,
improved energy recovery and storage technologies and
improved solid-state sensor technologies will be required.
The marriage of RF, dc, sensors and network technologies
promises a vast array of new technologies for the
improvement of human health and well-being.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a catch-all phrase
intended to encompass a range of emerging wireless
network technologies for sensing and control on a massive
and unprecedented scale. As a result, its domain overlaps
many existing technologies including Wireless Sensor
Networks, RFID, Zigbee, etc. The motivation for IoT
development is the expectation that widespread, low-cost
and instantaneous communication of sensor data of all
types (from human health, transportation, and
environmental sources), combined with “big data”
analytics, will result in dramatically lower system costs
and improvements in human health, safety, and overall
well-being.
Widespread deployment of IoT will ultimately require
improvements in RF technologies, integration of sensor
technologies, improved energy storage and recovery
technologies, as well as massive data mining, security, and
network protocol improvements.
II. IOT SYSTEMS
In the health-care field, the IoT is generally associated
with a range of technologies that unobtrusively and
continuously monitor human health metrics (blood
pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, blood O2, blood CO2,
glucose levels, neural signals, troponin, etc.) and
wirelessly transmit the data for clinical applications. The
data can be used immediately for treatment on an
individual basis, but it can also be collected from an entire
patient population and used to generate radically new
insights into disease prevention and cure.
This is one of the most demanding of IoT applications,
because of the advanced sensor technology required,
limited available power sources and the necessity to pass
the stringent FDA approval process. The result has been
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extended development times for even some of the most
promising applications.
One example of the potential of this technology is the
CardioMEMSTM pulmonary blood pressure sensor, which
recently gained FDA approval [1]. The CardioMEMS™
HF System provides ambulatory pulmonary artery (PA)
pressure monitoring using a small pressure sensor,
permanently implanted in the pulmonary artery via a
catheterization procedure, often done on an outpatient
basis. The sensor itself is a MEMS capacitive pressure
transducer, which is resonated with an inductor; changes in
the resonant frequency are a measure of the ambient
pulmonary pressure, and are measured through near-field
EM coupling. Patient-initiated sensor readings are
wirelessly transmitted to an external electronics unit and
stored in a secure website for clinicians to access and
review.
Direct monitoring of pulmonary artery pressure enables
early detection of worsening heart failure before
noticeable symptoms appear and allows proactive
management of patient care prior to a serious cardiac event
[2].
In the transportation field, IoT technology is often
associated with Vehicle-toVehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to
Infrastructure (V2I) applications, as well as the variety of
widely reported “self-driving” car technologies currently
under development.
The National Highway Transportation Safety
Administration (NHTSA) announced a notice of proposed
rule-making in August 2014, proposing a variety of V2V
technologies, all operating in the microwave band [3]. For
example, widespread deployment of V2V Left Turn Assist
(LTA) and Intersection Movement Assist (IMA) V2V
technologies could prevent up to 600,000 crashes and save
1,000 lives per year [4]. LTA warns drivers not to turn left
in front of another vehicle traveling in the opposite
direction and IMA warns them if it is not safe to enter an
intersection due to a high probability of colliding with one
or more vehicles [4].
Widespread deployment of robust automotive sensor
technologies (radar, lidar, video, etc) along with wireless
communications of the resulting data is expected to reduce
the fatality rate (currently still around 30,000 deaths per
year in the United States). The hope here is that
continuous collection of sensor data from an entire
61 SiRF 2015
population of active cars, will allow for dramatic safety
progress, as improved algorithms developed from this data
are made available to all cars on a rapid basis. Studies
from Google suggests that the aggregated sensor data rate
from a self-driving car is on the order of 1Gb/sec – within
the range of expected 5G long term wireless network
improvements [5].
IoT environmental sensors could eventually be widely
deployed to detect pathogens, heavy metal contamination,
and explosives.
III. ENERGY RECOVERY AND STORAGE FOR IOT
APPLICATIONS
Providing suitable power sources for implanted health
care IoT devices is an ongoing challenge. Inductive near-
field coupling is often employed, though the size of the
resulting implanted transponder is often uncomfortably
large.
Recently optimized mid-field coupling has been
exploited to dramatically improve the efficiency of the
power transfer at small implanted device scales (just a few
mm on a side) [6]. In this case, a frequency of 1.9 GHz
was found to provide optimum power transfer at safe
exposure levels to ultra-miniature devices implanted in the
heart.
The power levels of received RF energy within the body
are necessarily low for health and safety reasons, and so
the RF-dc conversion process is inefficient due to limits in
device turn-on voltage and circuit architectures.
Improvements in this conversion efficiency could result in
substantial improvements in the performance of implanted
devices, and this is a topic of active research in recent
years [7].
The challenges associated with EM powering of
implanted devices have led to an exploration of the use of
the body’s own power source – glucose. In this case, the
oxidation of glucose can lead to power densities on the
order of 180uW/cm2, which is especially attractive for
neural implant applications, since cerebral spinal fluid is
largely glucose-based [8].
Another proposed power source for implanted electronic
devices is ultrasonic energy, which has low losses when
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passed through tissue, though transduction efficiencies
(sound-to-dc) can be quite poor. Again, improvements in
these efficiencies could lead to significant improvement in
the performance and usability of implanted devices for
medical applications [9].
VII. CONCLUSION
The potential impact of widespread deployment of IoT
technology over the next forty years is comparable to the
impact wireless cellular technology has had over the last
forty years. Improvements in RFIC technology, micro-
power sources, and integrated sensors will be required in
order to fully exploit the possibilities.
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