Wireless powered communication: opportunities and challenges

By Suzhi Bi, Chin Keong Ho, Rui Zhang. 2014

980 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The performance of wireless communication is fundamentally constrained by the limited battery life of wireless devices, the operations of which are frequently disrupted due to the need of manual battery replacement/recharging. The recent advance in RF-enabled wireless energy transfer (WET) technology provides an attractive solution named wireless powered communication (WPC), where the wireless devices are powered by dedicated wireless power transmitters to provide continuous and stable microwave energy over the air. As a key enabling technology for truly perpetual communications, WPC opens up the potential to build a network with larger throughput, higher robustness, and increased flexibility compared to its battery-powered counterpart. However, the combination of wireless energy and information transmissions also raises many new research problems and implementation issues that need to be addressed. In this article, we provide an overview of state-of- the-art RF-enabled WET technologies and their applications to wireless communications, highlighting the key design challenges, solutions, and opportunities ahead.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A survey of data fusion in smart city applications (2019, methodology): “As shown in [228], [229], this method offers power to be transferred wirelessly without battery and energy harvesting module.”
Robust Resource Allocation for MIMO Wireless Powered Communication Networks Based on a Non-Linear EH Model (2016, background): “More specifically, wireless devices that are far away from the wireless power station can harvest considerably less energy compared to wireless devices in the proximity of the station [25].”
Wireless Charging Technologies: Fundamentals, Standards, and Network Applications (2015, background): “harvesting capability, also referred to as wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) [11].”
Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Network (2019, background): “1 (e) shows the application of IRS for realizing simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to miscellaneous devices in an Internet-ofthings (IoT) network [7], where the large aperture of IRS is leveraged to compensate the significant power loss over long distance via passive beamf”
Frequency Selective Hybrid Precoding for Limited Feedback Millimeter Wave Systems (2015, background): “MmWave wireless communication has been considered for many other applications beyond cellular systems including wireless local area networks [17], personal area networks [18], wearable device communications [19], [20], joint vehicular communication and radar systems [21]–[23], and simultaneous energ”
Fundamentals of Wireless Information and Power Transfer: From RF Energy Harvester Models to Signal and System Designs (2018, methodology): “Various review papers on WIPT have appeared in past years [11]–[21].”
Joint offloading and computing optimization in wireless powered mobile-edge computing systems (2017, methodology): “1]. Therefore, for simplicity, we assume that the input RF power is within the linear regime of the rectiﬁer, and consider a linear EH model which has been commonly adopted in the WPT literature [9]– [12], [14]–[22]. Accordingly, the harvested energy amount by user i over this time block is E i =TζE”
Energy Efficient Mobile Cloud Computing Powered by Wireless Energy Transfer (2015, neutral): “Recent advancements on SWIPT are surveyed in [26] and [27].”
Computation Rate Maximization for Wireless Powered Mobile-Edge Computing With Binary Computation Offloading (2017, background): “Recently, radio frequency (RF) based wireless power transfer (WPT) has emerged as an effective solution to the finite battery capacity problem [2]–[4].”
A Survey on Multiple-Antenna Techniques for Physical Layer Security (2017, background): “Generally speaking, a power receiver is usually closer to the source than the information receiver, since the energy harvesting circuitry is less sensitive than the information decoding circuitry [238], [239].”
Full-Duplex Wireless-Powered Relay With Self-Energy Recycling (2014, background): “Hence, the relay operates in full-duplex mode in the second phase with simultaneous information transmission and energy harvesting .”
Wireless powered communication networks: an overview (2015, background): “The recent advance of microwave wireless power transfer (WPT) technology enables to build wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), where wireless devices (WDs) are powered over the air by dedicated wireless power transmitters for communications [1]–[3].”
Advances in Energy Harvesting Communications: Past, Present, and Future Challenges (2016, background): “The works of [19], [21], [26]–[28] primarily cover the design topics of wireless-powered energy harvesting communications.”
UAV-Enabled Wireless Power Transfer: Trajectory Design and Energy Optimization (2017, background): “RADIO frequency (RF) transmission enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising solution to provide perpetual and cost-effective energy supplies to low-power electronic devices, and it is anticipated to have abundant applications in future Internet-of-things (IoT) wireless networks (see, [3],”
Learning-Based Computation Offloading for IoT Devices With Energy Harvesting (2017, methodology): “According to [21], the amount of the harvested energy of the IoT device in time slot k is given by”
Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Wireless Powered Communication Networks (2018, background): “…(SWIPT) and wireless powered communication network (WPCN), which unify the WPT and wireless information transfer (WIT) in a joint design framework over the same (downlink for both WPT and WIT) and opposite (downlink for WPT and uplink for WIT) transmission directions, respectively [6], [7].”
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Computation Offloading in Wireless Powered Mobile-Edge Computing Networks (2018, methodology): “Thanks to the recent advance in wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, the batteries of wireless devices (WDs) can be continuously charged over the air without the need of battery replacement [1].”
Modulation in the Air: Backscatter Communication Over Ambient OFDM Carrier (2017, background): “W IRELESS communication powered by ambient or dedicated radio-frequency (RF) sources has drawn significant attention recently [1], [2].”
Secrecy Performance Analysis of RIS-Aided Wireless Communication Systems (2020, methodology): “In addition, the application of RISs for realizing simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to various devices in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) network was considered in [3].”