Wireless powered communication: opportunities and challenges

TLDR

Wireless communication performance is limited by battery life, and wireless powered communication (WPC) using RF‑enabled wireless energy transfer offers continuous power but introduces new research challenges. This article reviews state‑of‑the‑art RF‑enabled WET technologies and their applications to wireless communications, highlighting key design challenges, solutions, and future opportunities. The authors survey current RF‑enabled WET methods and their integration into wireless networks, summarizing design strategies and performance considerations.

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.