Radio frequency energy harvesting for long lifetime wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks energy scarcity is a major concern on energy consumption, and by properly designing on the node network architecture or selecting efficient protocols of the networks, the maximum energy can be reduced significantly thereby increasing the network lifetime. However, in most of the cases, the sensor nodes are either powered by non-replaceable batteries, or there will be a considerable replacement cost. Thus a self-rechargeable sensor node design is necessary: the sensor node should be able to harvest energy from the environment. Among the existing techniques, harvesting energy from the radio frequency (RF) waves gives the lowest system design. Previous research on RF energy harvesting is based on the model that the radio energy is omnidirectional in the air. In this paper, a directional transmission/receiving model is proposed which can further overcome the path loss of the RF signals. On the node level, a virtual floating gate based CMOS biasing is used for the energy conversion circuit. With the proposed technique, the sensor node is able to harvest the energy from base station up to 30 meters.