Over the last 5 years, several communications standards bodies, starting with 3GPP and extending to IEEE and the Bluetooth SIG, have started to develop standards for ‘Ambient IoT’.
The aim of the technology is to create ultra-low power, and in many cases battery-free, devices that piggyback on other RF sources using both energy harvesting and backscattering techniques. Backscattering is a technique that reflects ambient radio waves to communicate with a receiver, thereby reducing the power required to communicate (potentially to zero). Using these twin approaches, Ambient IoT has the potential to serve as an alternative for both active and passive RFID and will unlock significant potential across multiple industry verticals such as agriculture, consumer goods, manufacturing, retail, utilities, transportation, and others. The resulting IoT devices can either have very small batteries, or no batteries at all, thus significantly reducing costs and aiding environmental sustainability with reduce requirements for battery disposal.
Ambient IoT is still at a nascent stage of development. In this report we provide an overview of the concept, the enabling technologies, the standardisation activities that are currently under way and some of the key use cases where it will likely be useful. The report also reviews some illustrative deployments and trials from Wiliot, HaiLa and Huawei.
