Green Wireless Power Transfer Networks

A wireless power transfer network (WPTN) aims to support devices with cable-less energy on-demand. Unfortunately, wireless power transfer itself-especially through radio frequency radiation rectification-is fairly inefficient due to decaying power with distance, antenna polarization, etc. Consequently, idle charging needs to be minimized to reduce the already large costs of providing energy to the receivers. In turn, energy saving in a WPTN can be boosted by simply switching off the energy transmitter when the received energy is too weak for rectification. Therefore in this paper we propose, and experimentally evaluate, two “green” protocols for the control plane of static charger/mobile receiver WPTN aimed at optimizing the charger workflow to make the WPTN reduce idle time of transmitters. Those protocols are: “beaconing,” where receivers advertise their presence to the WPTN, and “probing” exploiting the receiver feedback from the WPTN on the level of received energy. We demonstrate that both protocols reduce the unnecessary WPTN uptime, however trading it for the reduced energy provision, compared to the base case of “WPTN charger always on.” For example, our system (in our experiments) saves at most ≈80 % of energy at the charger with only ≈17% less energy possibly harvested.