Illumination Design for Joint Imaging and Wireless Power Transfer Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified hardware platform called IWPT that combines imaging and wireless power transfer to optimize spectrum use and power efficiency for future wireless networks, exploring antenna architectures and signal design trade-offs.

Contribution

It proposes the IWPT concept, formulates the joint design as an optimization problem, and develops algorithms for antenna array configurations to balance imaging and power transfer.

Findings

Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Trade-offs between imaging quality and power transfer efficiency are characterized.

Optimization approaches improve system performance in simulated scenarios.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel concept termed Integrated Imaging and Wireless Power Transfer (IWPT), wherein the integration of imaging and wireless power transfer functionalities is achieved on a unified hardware platform. IWPT leverages a transmitting array to efficiently illuminate a specific Region of Interest (ROI), enabling the extraction of ROI's scattering coefficients while concurrently providing wireless power to nearby users. The integration of IWPT offers compelling advantages, including notable reductions in power consumption and spectrum utilization, pivotal for the optimization of future 6G wireless networks. As an initial investigation, we explore two antenna architectures: a fully digital array and a digital/analog hybrid array. Our goal is to characterize the fundamental trade-off between imaging and wireless power transfer by optimizing the illumination signal. With imaging operating in the near-field, we formulate the illumination signal design as an optimization problem that minimizes the condition number of the equivalent channel. To address this optimization problem, we propose an semi-definite relaxation-based approach for the fully digital array and an alternating optimization algorithm for the hybrid array. Finally, numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed solutions and demonstrate the trade-off between imaging and wireless power transfer.