Abstract

A central concern for large-scale sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has been battery capacity and how to recharge it. Recent advances have pointed to a technique capable of collecting energy from radio frequency (RF) waves called radio frequency-based energy harvesting (RF-EH) as a solution for low-power networks where cables or even changing the battery is unfeasible. The technical literature addresses energy harvesting techniques as an isolated block by dealing with energy harvesting apart from the other aspects inherent to the transmitter and receiver. Thus, the energy spent on data transmission cannot be used together to charge the battery and decode information. As an extension to them, we propose here a method that enables the information to be recovered from the battery charge by designing a sensor network operating with a semanticfunctional communication framework. Moreover, we propose an event-driven sensor network in which batteries are recharged by applying the technique RF-EH. In order to evaluate system performance, we investigated event signaling, event detection, empty battery, and signaling success rates, as well as the Age of Information (AoI). We discuss how the main parameters are related to the system behavior based on a representative case study, also discussing the battery charge behavior. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed system.