Wireless Powered Communication: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

Wireless powered communication (WPC) leverages RF energy transfer to enable perpetual wireless devices, offering higher throughput and robustness, but introduces new research challenges in design and implementation.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of RF-enabled wireless energy transfer technologies, their applications, and discusses key challenges and future opportunities.

Findings

WPC enables continuous wireless device operation without batteries.

RF energy transfer can significantly improve network robustness and capacity.

Several design challenges and solutions are identified for implementing WPC.

Abstract

The performance of wireless communication is fundamentally constrained by the limited battery life of wireless devices, whose operations are frequently disrupted due to the need of manual battery replacement/recharging. The recent advance in radio frequency (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 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, with highlights on the key design challenges, solutions, and opportunities ahead.