Towards standardized 6G connectivity for ambiently-powered energy neutral IoT devices

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is widely recognised as having the potential to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.

However, to truly benefit society and enable a sustainable future, IoT innovations will need to address the technology gap that exists in powering the rising number of IoT devices.

Specifically, the AMBIENT-6G consortium argues that it will be impossible to power hundreds of billions of future IoT devices with batteries that need to be replaced or recharged manually. The maintenance costs, environmental impact, and safety hazards will just be too high.

Instead, AMBIENT-6G proposes a new class of energy-neutral devices (ENDs) that will be connected to the IoT through novel ultra-low-power 6G technologies.

ENDs exploit ambient energy harvesting or wireless power transfer to recharge their storage and power their operations, allowing them to achieve decades-long energy autonomy.

The overall objective of AMBIENT-6G is to design, prototype, validate, and standardize hard- and software technology solutions for intelligent ENDs, and the 6G network infrastructure that connects them to the Internet.

To achieve this objective, the project will provide technological innovations in terms of (i) END hardware and software components to enable energy harvesting and management, as well as backscatter and active wireless communications, (ii) a new 6G low-power wide area network technology with significantly lower energy consumption than current technologies, and (iii) machine learning both on-device and orchestrated along the Cloud-Edge-Device continuum to support intelligent management of the device and network resources, as well as local application data processing.

AMBIENT-6G will maximize the impact of the above innovations by actively participating in 3GPP Ambient-IoT and other related standardization activities, and adopting an open science approach that facilitates further integration of the AMBIENT-6G technology in follow-up research.