On the Optimal Deployment of Power Beacons for Massive Wireless Energy Transfer

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimization framework for deploying power beacons in wireless energy transfer networks to maximize fairness and reliability, while reducing electromagnetic exposure and extending coverage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deployment optimization method that guarantees network-wide energy outage constraints and improves energy harvesting fairness for IoT devices.

Findings

Deployment optimization enhances energy supply reliability.

Number of PBs has a greater impact than antennas per PB.

Coverage area can be extended with fixed power budget, reducing electromagnetic radiation.

Abstract

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is emerging as an enabling green technology for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. WET allows the IoT devices to wirelessly recharge their batteries with energy from external sources such as dedicated radio frequency transmitters called power beacons (PBs). In this paper, we investigate the optimal deployment of PBs that guarantees a network-wide energy outage constraint. Optimal positions for the PBs are determined by maximizing the average incident power for the worst location in the service area since no information about the sensor deployment is provided. Such network planning guarantees the fairest harvesting performance for all the IoT devices. Numerical simulations evidence that our proposed optimization framework improves the energy supply reliability compared to benchmark schemes. Additionally, we show that although both, the number of deployed PBs and the number of antennas per PB, introduce performance improvements, the former has a dominant role. Finally, our proposal allows to extend the coverage area while keeping the total power budget fixed, which additionally reduces the level of electromagnetic radiation in the vicinity of PBs.