Light-Based IoT-Enabled Battery-Free Active Product Monitoring for Sustainable Smart Packaging Applications

Conventional active product monitoring systems typically rely on battery and Radio Frequency (RF) communication designs, which pose challenges to sustainability and scalability, limiting their effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a sustainable smart packaging system based on Light-based Internet of Things (LIoT) architecture, termed LIoT-based Active Smart Packaging (LIoT-ASP). The proposed solution integrates Photovoltaic Energy Harvesting (PV-EH) and OpticalWireless Communication (OWC) to enable battery-free, energy-autonomous operation for product condition monitoring in retail and logistics environments. A prototype system was developed using commercially available components, incorporating both visible light downlink and Infrared (IR) uplink channels based on consumer device IR protocol-inspired OWC, adapted for low-power operation. The bidirectional OWC supports a data rate of 1.1 kbps, sufficient for periodic sensing and display updates in low-throughput smart packaging applications. The system employs energy-aware control mechanisms and intermittent operation strategies to manage sensing and data communication under variable indoor illumination. Performance of the LIoT-ASP concept was assessed through the developed proof-of-concept prototype system, followed by experimental validation in a real-world scenario involving temperature-sensitive dairy products. The system successfully detected and reported threshold violations via cloud-connected mobile alerts, demonstrating reliable end-to-end functionality. These findings validate the practical feasibility of deploying LIoT-ASP systems as a sustainable and scalable solution for smart packaging applications.