Information Harvesting for Far-Field RF Power Transfer through Index Modulation

By the sixth-generation (6G) era, Internet-of-Things (IoT) evolves into an enormous scale of technologies and use-cases. As the IoT systems are comprised of a huge amount of low-power network elements, sensors, and smart devices, connected with each other, it is important to have a sufficient level of energy resources for carrying out assigned communication tasks and receiving software/firmware updates from the network management. Aside from splitting data and power into different domains as in simultaneous data communication and RF power transfer, a novel protocol, information harvesting (IH), has been recently introduced, which lies on transmitting information on top of the existing wireless power transfer mechanism. In this paper, we investigate the implementation of IH in terms of secrecy capacity and energy harvesting capability. The numerical results show that the IH may turn out to be a pivotal methodology that converts existing wireless power transfer mechanisms into data transmission tools by deploying an indexing in transmitter entities.