Communications and Signals Design for Wireless Power Transmission

TL;DR

This paper reviews the design challenges and recent advances in radiative wireless power transfer systems, focusing on communication techniques, hardware architectures, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of radiative WPT technologies, highlighting new signal processing methods and system design strategies to overcome current challenges.

Findings

Energy beamforming enhances power transfer efficiency.

Massive MIMO and mmWave enable higher WPT performance.

Co-design of wireless power and communication systems is promising.

Abstract

Radiative wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology to provide cost-effective and real-time power supplies to wireless devices. Although radiative WPT shares many similar characteristics with the extensively studied wireless information transfer or communication, they also differ significantly in terms of design objectives, transmitter/receiver architectures and hardware constraints, etc. In this article, we first give an overview on the various WPT technologies, the historical development of the radiative WPT technology and the main challenges in designing contemporary radiative WPT systems. Then, we focus on discussing the new communication and signal processing techniques that can be applied to tackle these challenges. Topics discussed include energy harvester modeling, energy beamforming for WPT, channel acquisition, power region characterization in multi-user WPT, waveform design with linear and non-linear energy receiver model, safety and health issues of WPT, massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) and millimeter wave (mmWave) enabled WPT, wireless charging control, and wireless power and communication systems co-design. We also point out directions that are promising for future research.