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Tsinghua Science and Technology 2020, 25(6): 758-775 https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2020.9010008
Open Access | Issue | Published: 07 May 2020

Distributed Beamforming Based Wireless Power Transfer: Analysis and Realization

Show Author's Information Xiaoran Fan,  Han Ding,  Yanyong Zhang( ),  Wade Trappe,  Zhu Han,  Rich Howard
Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China.
Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230052, China.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.
Keywords:
Wireless Power Transfer (WPT), distributed beamforming, wireless network
Cite this article:
Fan X, Ding H, Zhang Y, et al. Distributed Beamforming Based Wireless Power Transfer: Analysis and Realization. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2020, 25(6): 758-775. https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2020.9010008
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Abstract Full text About this article

This paper presents a new Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) approach by aligning the phases of a group of spatially distributed Radio Frequency (RF) transmitters (TX) at the target receiver (RX) device. Our approach can transfer energy over tens of meters and even to targets blocked by obstacles. Compared to popular beamforming based WPTs, our approach leads to a drastically different energy density distribution: the energy density at the target receiver is much higher than the energy density at other locations. Due to this unique energy distribution pattern, our approach offers a safer WPT solution, which can be potentially scaled up to ship a higher level of energy over longer distances. Specifically, we model the energy density distribution and prove that our proposed system can create a high energy peak exactly at the target receiver. Then we conduct detailed simulation studies to investigate how the actual energy distribution is impacted by various important system parameters, including number/topology of transmitters, transmitter antenna directionality, the distance between receiver and transmitters, and environmental multipath. Finally, we build an actual prototype with 17 N210 and 4 B210 Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) nodes, through which we validate the salient features and performance promises of the proposed system.


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About this article

Distributed Beamforming Based Wireless Power Transfer: Analysis and Realization

Show Author's information Xiaoran Fan, Han Ding, Yanyong Zhang( ), Wade Trappe, Zhu Han, Rich Howard
Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China.
Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230052, China.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA.

Abstract

This paper presents a new Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) approach by aligning the phases of a group of spatially distributed Radio Frequency (RF) transmitters (TX) at the target receiver (RX) device. Our approach can transfer energy over tens of meters and even to targets blocked by obstacles. Compared to popular beamforming based WPTs, our approach leads to a drastically different energy density distribution: the energy density at the target receiver is much higher than the energy density at other locations. Due to this unique energy distribution pattern, our approach offers a safer WPT solution, which can be potentially scaled up to ship a higher level of energy over longer distances. Specifically, we model the energy density distribution and prove that our proposed system can create a high energy peak exactly at the target receiver. Then we conduct detailed simulation studies to investigate how the actual energy distribution is impacted by various important system parameters, including number/topology of transmitters, transmitter antenna directionality, the distance between receiver and transmitters, and environmental multipath. Finally, we build an actual prototype with 17 N210 and 4 B210 Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) nodes, through which we validate the salient features and performance promises of the proposed system.

Keywords: Wireless Power Transfer (WPT), distributed beamforming, wireless network

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Received: 07 March 2020
Accepted: 14 March 2020
Published: 07 May 2020
Issue date: December 2020

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