Power Management Scheme of a Photovoltaic System for Self-Powered Internet of Things Renan Emanuelli Rotunno, Petros Spachos and Stefano Gregori School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada Abstract—Energy efficiency is especially important for many Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as prototyping boards and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. In this paper, we design and implement the power management of a photovoltaic system for a solar-powered BLE beacon, using discrete components. The main goal is to increase energy efficiency and extend the lifespan of the beacon that contains a battery and a solar cell as power sources. The introduced design can be further implemented in a printed circuit board with optimal components to increase energy efficiency and provide a reliable power supply system. Keywords— Self-powered Internet of Things; Power Manage- ment; Photovoltaic System. I. I NTRODUCTION Most of the devices that are connected to the Internet every- day, are devices that have at least one sensing element, creating great opportunities for more direct integration between the physical world and computer-based systems [1]. This is the idea behind the Internet of Things (IoT), a development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data. The interconnectedness of all things is continuously expand- ing with the ultimate goal to improve quality of life. The aim is to have every person connected with their surroundings, whether it be at home, at work, or in public spaces. Although most of these devices have minimal energy requirements, their energy efficiency can greatly affect their overall performance and adaptation [2]–[4]. Energy harvesting techniques can alle- viate the problem [5]–[10]. Self-powered devices can extend their lifetime while they can also improve their performance. Solar-powered IoT devices are a promising approach [11], [12]. In this work, we propose a power management scheme of a photovoltaic system for self-powered IoT devices. The proposed scheme is implemented and tested with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. Two experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed scheme with a conventional implementation, in order to assess the improve- ment in energy efficiency. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the solar-powered system. The introduced power- management scheme is discussed in Section III followed by the implementation and experimental results is Section IV. We conclude this work in Section V. (a) Conventional system. (b) Proposed system. Fig. 1: Solar powered management systems. II. SOLAR-POWERED SYSTEM Solar-powered systems are a popular solution for energy- constrained wireless sensor nodes that are placed outdoors. Traditional approaches use the solar cell to charge the battery. The battery is then responsible to power the node, based on the implemented conditioning, as shown in Fig. 1a. 978-1-5386-7266-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE