Adaptively Directional Wireless Power Transfer for Large Sensor Networks

Wireless power transfer (WPT) prolongs the lifetime of wireless sensor network by providing sustainable power supply to the distributed sensor nodes (SNs) via electromagnetic waves. To improve the energy transfer efficiency in a large WPT system, this paper proposes an adaptively directional WPT (AD-WPT) scheme, where the power beacons (PBs) adapt the energy beamforming strategy to SNs' locations by concentrating the transmit power on the nearby SNs within the efficient charging radius. With the aid of stochastic geometry, we derive the closed-form expressions of the distribution metrics of the aggregate received power at a typical SN. We analyze the optimal charging radius that maximizes the average received power. It is shown that both the optimal charging radius and maximized average received power decrease with the increased density of the SNs and the energy beamwidth. Finally, we show that the optimal AD-WPT can significantly improve the energy transfer efficiency compared to the traditional omnidirectional WPT.