arXiv · 2601.17656
Battery-Free and Gateway-Free Cellular IoT Water Leak Detection System
Abstract
This paper presents a battery-free and gateway-free water leak detection system capable of direct communication over LTE-M (Cat-M1). The system operates solely on energy harvested through a hydroelectric mechanism driven by an electrochemical sensor, thereby removing the need for conventional batteries. To address the stringent startup and operational power demands of LTE-M transceivers, the architecture incorporates a compartmentalized sensing module and a dedicated power management subsystem, comprising a boost converter, supercapacitor based energy storage, and a hysteresis controlled load isolation circuit. This design enables autonomous, direct to cloud data transmission without reliance on local networking infrastructure. Experimental results demonstrate consistent LTE-M beacon transmissions triggered by water induced energy generation, underscoring the system's potential for sustainable, maintenance free, and globally scalable IoT leak detection applications in smart infrastructure.
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Roshan Nepal, Brandon Brown, Shishangbo Yu, Roozbeh Abbasi, Norman Zhou, George Shaker. 2026-01-25. Battery-Free and Gateway-Free Cellular IoT Water Leak Detection System. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17656
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