Performance evaluation of wireless sensor node powered by RF energy harvesting

In this paper, a method of designing an autonomous Wireless Sensor Node (WSN) powered by RF energy Harvesting is proposed. The autonomous sensor node is composed of two components, the WSN and the RF energy harvesting system. The RF harvester is based on a rectenna that consists of an antenna associated with a rectifier circuit. The used rectifier circuit is an optimized Schenkel voltage doubler rectifier. The designed harvester show a recovered DC power of 115.7 μW with 0. 27 V of the output voltage at 0 dBm of input power. A material block-level modeling of a WSN in a star topology network is proposed and used to estimate the energetic budget of the node. The sensor node performance is then evaluated regarding packet size and time ratio between standby and active state. It is observed that the recovered RF power allows considering a minimum transmit packet size of 801 bits for applications where measurements are made every 100 s.