Authors: Gitanjali Sharma, Manoj Bairagi, Sneha Kulkarni, Anurag Jain
Abstract: Battery-free Internet of Things (IoT) nodes are emerging as an important solution for sustainable sensing, monitoring, and automation systems. These nodes operate only on harvested energy from environment such as light, vibration, RF signals, and thermal gradients. In such systems, firmware design plays a very critical role because hardware alone cannot guarantee ultra-low power operation. Proper firmware techniques like aggressive sleep scheduling, event-driven execution, energy aware task scheduling, and memory optimization decides whether the node can operate continuously or not. This paper reviews the principles and methods for ultra low power firmware development specifically for battery-free IoT nodes. It discusses energy harvesting models, intermittent computing, state retention, communication optimization, and real time constraints. Tables and figures are provided to explain firmware strategies. This review will help embedded designers to understand how firmware architecture directly impacts energy consumption and reliability of battery-less devices.
Keywords: Battery-free IoT, Ultra low power firmware, Energy harvesting, Intermittent computing, Sleep scheduling, Embedded systems, Energy aware scheduling.
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