Nowadays, wireless sensor networks are becoming increasingly important in several sectors including industry, transportation, environment and medicine. This trend is reinforced by the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in almost all sectors. Autonomous energy supply is thereby an essential aspect as it decides the flexible positioning and easy maintenance, which are decisive for the acceptance of this technology, its wide use and sustainability. Significant improvements made in the last years have shown interesting possibilities for realizing energy-aware wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) by designing manifold and highly efficient energy converters and reducing energy consumption of hardware, software and communication protocols. Using only a few of these techniques or focusing on only one aspect is not sufficient to realize practicable and market relevant solutions. This paper therefore provides a comprehensive review on system design for battery-free and energy-aware WSN, making use of ambient energy or wireless energy transmission. It addresses energy supply strategies and gives a deep insight in energy management methods as well as possibilities for energy saving on node and network level. The aim therefore is to provide deep insight into system design and increase awareness of suitable techniques for realizing battery-free and energy-aware wireless sensor nodes.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), batteries are unlikely to be replaced or recharged once they get depleted, because of costs and feasibility. In a typical application, sensor nodes should be accessible and able to respond within a defined period of time, especially in real-time applications. However, the idle listening of the radio wastes most of the energy since the radio transceiver is constantly active. On the other hand, putting it into sleep state disconnects the node from the network. To cope with such a challenge, an ultra-low-power radio receiver referred to as a wake-up receiver (WuRx) handles the idle listening while keeping the main radio completely off. A WuRx consumes much less power than the main transceiver and triggers an interrupt only when a packet with a user-defined address is received. Embedding such a device enables better event-triggered applications where real-time behavior is required and a longer lifetime is mandatory. The proposed WuRx features practical sensitivity and includes the minimum number of active components in order to remain within the power budget. In this paper, an ultra-low-power WuRx with a power of 7.5 µW and a sensitivity of −60 dBm is developed. The decoding process of 16 bit of a wake-up packet (WuPt) takes less than 15 ms.