This paper addresses the concept of a wirelessly powered and battery-free wireless sensor for Cyber-Physical Systems dedicated to Structural Health Monitoring applications in harsh environments. The proposed material architecture is based on a smart mesh Wireless Sensor Network composed of Sensing Nodes and Communicating Nodes. The Sensing Nodes are used to sense the physical world. They are battery-free and wirelessly powered by a dedicated radiofrequency source via a far-field Wireless Power Transmission system. The data collected by the Sensing Nodes are sent to the Communicating Nodes that, between others, interface the physical world with the digital world through the Internet. A prototype of the Sensing Node -using a LoRaWAN uplink wireless communication and a temperature and relative humidity sensor-has been manufactured and experiments have been performed to characterize it. The experimental results prove that the periodicity of measurement and communication can be controlled wirelessly by using only the Wireless Power Transmission downlink. In this paper, we highlight the performance of this complete implementation of a wirelessly powered and battery-free wireless Sensing Node -not yet integrated or miniaturized-designed for implementing complete Cyber-Physical Systems and based on Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer. Finally, an investigation of comparable implementations of battery-free Sensing Nodes for Cyber-Physical Systems is carried out.

This paper addresses the practical implementation of a wireless sensors network designed to actualize cyber-physical systems that are dedicated to structural health monitoring applications in the construction domain. This network consists of a mesh grid composed of LoRaWAN battery-free wireless sensing nodes that collect physical data and communicating nodes that interface the sensing nodes with the digital world through the Internet. Two prototypes of sensing nodes were manufactured and are powered wirelessly by using a far-field wireless power transmission technique and only one dedicated RF energy source operating in the ISM 868 MHz frequency band. These sensing nodes can simultaneously perform temperature and relative humidity measurements and can transmit the measured data wirelessly over long-range distances by using the LoRa technology and the LoRaWAN protocol. Experimental results for a simplified network confirm that the periodicity of the measurements and data transmission of the sensing nodes can be controlled by the dedicated RF source (embedded in or just controlled by the associated communicating node), by tuning the radiated power density of the RF waves, and without any modification of the software or the hardware implemented in the sensing nodes.

Machine-Type Communications are meeting a growing interest on the consumer market. Dedicated technologies arise to support more robust communications involving a massive number of low cost, low energy-consuming devices. This paper discusses the coverage extension of a Low-Powered Wide Area Network using a Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation, benefiting from the improved performance of a recent standard. The transmission complies with the user equipment specifications standardized as NB-IoT by 3GPP in Release 13. This radio technology is an update on LTE standard with enhanced performances: the supported path loss can be 20 dB higher than with legacy LTE. This improvement makes satellite- compatible the small and energy-constrained devices. A specific unidirectional system is defined, and a link budget is derived. Also, a receiver architecture is presented, that takes into consideration satellite channel specific impairments.

Providing energy to Internet of Things (IoT) apparatuses is ever more challenging. Humans are increasingly invested in the revolutionary new scenario that experts call Industry 4.0 , where billions of electronic devices are interconnected with one another. The operations of battery charging or battery replacement for these devices will soon become infeasible. As a consequence, radiative wireless power transfer (WPT) will soon become a leading technology as it is the only method available to support this technological revolution, and several information communication ­technology companies have already begun to actualize their interest in it.

The research on the design of receiver front-ends for very high data-rate communication in the 60 GHz band in nanoscale Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies is going on for some time now. Although a multitude of 60 GHz front-ends have been published in recent years, they are not consequently optimized for low power consumption. Thus, these front-ends dissipate too much power for battery-powered applications like handheld devices, mobile phones, and wireless sensor networks. This article describes the design of a direct conversion receiver front-end that addresses the issue of power consumption, while at the same time permitting low cost (due to area minimization by the use of spiral inductors). It is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology. The realized front-end achieves a record power consumption of only 43 mW including low-noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), a local oscillator (LO) buffer, and a baseband buffer (without this latter buffer the power consumption is even lower, only 29 mW). Its pad-limited size is 0.55 × 1 mm². At the same time, the front-end achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to its other properties: Its maximum measured power conversion gain is 30 dB, the RF and IF bandwidths are 56.5–61.5 and 0–1.5 GHz, respectively, its measured minimum noise figure is 9.2 dB, and its measured IP_−1 dBis −36 dBm.

This letter presents a differential voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) implemented in a 65 nm bulk CMOS technology for the unlicensed 60 GHz band. It achieves a record efficiency of 4.9% by generating a maximum differential output power of -0.9 dBm while drawing 16.5 mA from a 1 V supply (including buffers). This VCO is thus perfectly suited for the use in a fully integrated 60 GHz transceiver for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSN). The minimum measured phase noise is -90.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset and -112 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset, the measured tuning range reaches from 57.6 to 60.8 GHz.