A survey on hardware design issues in RF energy harvesting for wireless sensor networks (WSN)

Today, the lifetime-improvement in the wireless sensor networksis one of the most critical issue for researchers. The efficient-Radio Frequency (RF) Energy harvesting technique provides themicro-power needed for sensor node and flexibility of charging the battery. Many researchers are working on the hardware issues like new emerging technologies to optimize the efficiency of the circuit. Some are working on commercially available devices (ICs, Schottky diodes, Antennas etc.), component level (using VLSI design) and mathematical modeling to generate efficient models for RF energy Harvesting. Powercast companies provide circuits which input the RF signal and output it in the form of charging voltage and current. In this paper, a detailed theoretical study and literature has been surveyed to find current and new era of research in this domain. This paper may help the researchers to find new points for the research in the domain of Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting.