A Low-Complexity Beamforming Design for Multiuser Wireless Energy Transfer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-complexity beamforming scheme for multiuser wireless energy transfer that relies on channel statistics rather than full CSI, enabling efficient power delivery to IoT devices with improved performance as antennas increase.

Contribution

It proposes a simple energy beamforming method based on first-order channel statistics, reducing complexity while maintaining effective power transfer in multiuser IoT scenarios.

Findings

Scheme outperforms benchmark methods in simulations

Performance improves with more antennas at the power beacon

Angular rotations can further enhance energy transfer efficiency

Abstract

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is a green enabler of low-power Internet of Things (IoT). Therein, traditional optimization schemes relying on full channel state information (CSI) are often too costly to implement due to excessive energy consumption and high processing complexity. This letter proposes a simple, yet effective, energy beamforming scheme that allows a multi-antenna power beacon (PB) to fairly power a set of IoT devices by only relying on the first-order statistics of the channels. In addition to low complexity, the proposed scheme performs favorably as compared to benchmarking schemes and its performance improves as the number of PB's antennas increases. Finally, it is shown that further performance improvement can be achieved through proper angular rotations of the PB.