Communications and Signals Design for Wireless Power Transmission

TLDR

Radiative wireless power transfer offers cost‑effective, real‑time power for wireless devices but differs from conventional wireless communication in objectives, architectures, and hardware constraints. This paper surveys radiative WPT technologies, their historical evolution, and key design challenges, and reviews state‑of‑the‑art communication and signal‑processing methods to address them while outlining promising future research directions. The authors discuss energy harvester modeling, beamforming, channel acquisition, multi‑user power region characterization, waveform design for linear and nonlinear receivers, safety, massive MIMO and millimeter‑wave enabled WPT, charging control, and co‑design of power and communication systems.

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, and so on. In this paper, 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 the state-of-the-art 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 multiple-input multiple-output and millimeter wave enabled WPT, wireless charging control, and wireless power and communication systems co-design. We also point out directions that are promising for future research.