Dynamic Power Splitting Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer Split Receiver for Wireless Sensor Networks

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) presents a genuine opportunity toward achieving sustainable low-energy wireless devices. This paper introduces a receiver design for an energy harvesting sensor node (SN). The receiver is equipped with multiple radio frequency (RF) inputs. Furthermore, the receiver contains separate circuitries for information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) with dynamic power splitting (PS). The ID and EH circuits are connected to a power splitter that first combines all the RF inputs and then splits the power between the circuitries. Moreover, dynamic PS allows regulating the power split ratio between EH and ID circuitries. Consequently, the output of the EH circuit can be monitored and increased by adjusting the PS ratio. The proposed receiver design increases the harvestable energy by moving the ID into a separate circuitry. A voltage multiplier arranged in a Dickson scheme is used to level up the received voltage. At the transmitter side, the energy signal (ES) is sent through high power unmodulated continuous wave centered at the carrier frequency, while the information signal (IS) is sent via low power subcarriers around the carrier frequency. Such power allocation increases the harvestable power while reducing interference to external wireless networks. Moreover, different system measurements, including harvested energy from the received signal and data rates, are presented, where the split receiver scheme showed a significant improvement compared to the combined scheme in terms of harvestable power.