Design of an active radio frequency powered multi-hop wireless sensor network

In this paper, we present a low power solution for multi-hop wireless sensor networks using active radio frequency (RF) harvesting. We show by careful design of both hardware and network protocol that it is possible to design multi-hop networks that use minimal power. We identified critical factors and incorporated them into the protocol design, which we validated by implementing a small testbed of nodes using commercially available RF energy harvesting devices. The speed at which sensor data can be retrieved from the network has been evaluated and deemed to be viable for wireless sensor networks used in low duty cycle monitoring applications.