Towards energy-neutral sensors: finalist demonstrator at IEEE SENSORS 2026
A KU Leuven demonstrator designed by Tijl Schepens and coordinated and presented by Gilles Callebaut was selected as a finalist at IEEE SENSORS 2026. Developed in collaboration with Liesbet Van der Perre, the project explores how affordable, widely available electronics can reduce the energy needed for wireless sensor communication.
Wireless sensors support remote monitoring, but keeping them powered remains a challenge. Replacing batteries becomes difficult when devices are deployed in large numbers or in places that are hard to reach. The long-term goal is energy-neutral operation: sensors whose energy needs can be met by harvesting energy from their surroundings. Reducing the energy required to communicate is an important step towards that goal.
The demonstrator investigates backscatter communication, which sends information by changing how an antenna reflects a radio signal supplied by a separate transmitter. The team implemented this approach using an inexpensive, commercially available microcontroller and a custom radio front-end. This makes it possible to explore advanced backscatter techniques with readily available components.
A key feature is the use of eight carefully designed electrical loads to control the reflected signal. Cycling through these loads produces a cleaner signal with fewer unwanted frequency components, helping to limit interference with neighbouring communication channels. The microcontroller’s built-in data-transfer hardware handles the rapid switching automatically, leaving its processor available for other tasks, such as reading sensors.
During the live demonstration, visitors could see the reflected signals as frequency sweeps, known as chirps, and observe transmitted data being decoded by a standard receiver. The setup uses the modular, open-source Energy-Neutral Device (END) Platform, which supports research combining wireless communication, sensing, energy harvesting and storage. Its interchangeable boards allow researchers to investigate individual components and combine them into experimental systems.
Within SUSTAIN-6G, the work aligns directly with KU Leuven’s contribution on energy-neutral IoT under the project’s work on sustainable 6G technology. It addresses energy consumption at the sensor itself and provides a practical platform for studying the trade-offs between communication performance, energy requirements and hardware cost. Lower communication energy requirements could help future sensors operate for longer between battery replacements or make operation on harvested energy more feasible.
Of course, taking a prototype to a conference also brought a familiar part of live demonstrations: something broke. Gilles turned his hotel-room desk into a temporary electronics workbench to repair the setup before presenting it. The accompanying photo captures some of the hands-on work behind the finalist demonstrator.
