Ultralow-Power Sensing Framework for Internet of Things: A Smart Gas Meter as a Case

Gas serves as one of the most indispensable energy sources for industrial production and household life. In order to improve the gas utilization efficiency, smart gas meters for the Internet of Things (IoT) has been designed to achieve two-way communication and remote control functions. However, the existing smart gas meter does not consider further reduction of power consumption. Thus, we designed an ultralow-power sensing framework for IoT and applied it to the smart gas meter. Based on a thorough analysis of the metering system, we propose an ultralow power system framework and a low-power peripheral management solution to reach ultralow power consumption. Also, we propose a cooperative sensing scheme to achieve stability and accuracy of gas volume detection. Finally, we implement a real smart gas manage system to evaluate our low-power smart gas meter solution. Verified by a comparative test, the proposed gas meter successfully reduces the power consumption by at least 37% compared to the baseline. The experimental results verify the innovative design and confirm that the proposed gas meter features ultralow power consumption, high precision, and high reliability.