Fundamentals of Wireless Information and Power Transfer: From RF Energy Harvester Models to Signal and System Designs

By Bruno Clerckx, Rui Zhang, Robert Schober, D. Wing, K. Ng, Dong In Kim, H. Vincent Poor. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2018

674 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Radio waves carry both energy and information simultaneously. Nevertheless, radio-frequency (RF) transmissions of these quantities have traditionally been treated separately. Currently, the community is experiencing a paradigm shift in wireless network design, namely, unifying wireless transmission of information and power so as to make the best use of the RF spectrum and radiation as well as the network infrastructure for the dual purpose of communicating and energizing. In this paper, we review and discuss recent progress in laying the foundations of the envisioned dual purpose networks by establishing a signal theory and design for wireless information and power transmission (WIPT) and identifying the fundamental tradeoff between conveying information and power wirelessly. We start with an overview of WIPT challenges and technologies, namely, simultaneous WIPT (SWIPT), wirelessly powered communication networks (WPCNs), and wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WPBC). We then characterize energy harvesters and show how WIPT signal and system designs crucially revolve around the underlying energy harvester model. To that end, we highlight three different energy harvester models, namely, one linear model and two nonlinear models, and show how WIPT designs differ for each of them in single-user and multi-user deployments. Topics discussed include rate-energy region characterization, transmitter and receiver architectures, waveform design, modulation, beamforming and input distribution optimizations, resource allocation, and RF spectrum use. We discuss and check the validity of the different energy harvester models and the resulting signal theory and design based on circuit simulations, prototyping, and experimentation. We also point out numerous directions that are promising for future research.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48bcd9cc2d0a1fff4a949c7c3be9f39e89faca2e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Qingqing Wu
3. Yong Zeng
4. Shuowen Zhang
5. Merouane Debbah
6. Robert Schober
7. Jie Xu
8. Changsheng You

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Qingqing Wu
3. Yong Zeng
4. Robert Schober
5. Shuowen Zhang
6. Changsheng You
7. Beixiong Zheng
8. Jie Xu

Citations in the corpus

• Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “RF transmission enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) is envisioned as a promising solution to provide perpetual energy supplies for massive low-power devices in the forthcoming IoT networks [240,241].”
• Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Optimization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted SWIPT Under QoS Constraints (2019, background): “nd beyond) wireless network. To this end, the dual use of radio frequency (RF) signals for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently gained an upsurge of interest [1], [2]. However, an energy user (EU) typically requires much higher receive power than that of the sign”
• A Survey of Multi-Access Edge Computing in 5G and Beyond: Fundamentals, Technology Integration, and State-of-the-Art (2019, neutral): “The first two technologies rely on near-field electromagnetic (EM) waves, which cannot support mobility”