Far-Field RF Wireless Power Transfer with Blind Adaptive Beamforming for Internet of Things Devices

IEEE Access

Jan M. Rabaey¹  Xiaodong Wang²  Pavan S. Yedavalli²  Taneli Riihonen³ 

[1] Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA;Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Helsinki, Finland;

关键词: Wireless power transfer;    radio-frequency energy harvesting;    software-defined radios;    experiments;    beamforming;   

DOI  :  10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2666299

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Wireless power transfer (WPT) has long been one of the main goals of Nikola Tesla, the forefather of electromagnetic applications. In this paper, we investigate radio-frequency beamforming in the radiative far field for WPT. First, an analytical model of the channel fading is presented, and a blind adaptive beamforming algorithm is adapted to the WPT context. The algorithm is computationally light, because we need not explicitly estimate the channel state information. Then, a testbed with a multiple-antenna software-defined radio configuration on the transmitting side and a programmable energy harvester on the receiving side is developed in order to validate the algorithm in this specific power application. From the results, it can be seen that the implementation of this version of beamforming indeed improves the harvested power. Specifically, at various distances from 50 cm to 1.5 m, the algorithm converges with two, three, and four antennas with an increasing gain as we increase the number of antennas. These encouraging results could have far-reaching consequences in providing wireless power to Internet of Things devices, our target application.

【 授权许可】

Unknown