Energy Harvesting Using a Low-Cost Rectenna for Internet of Things (IoT) Applications

Traditionally employed human-to-human and human-to-machine communication has recently been replaced by a new trend known as the Internet of things (IoT). IoT enables device-to-device communication without any human intervention, hence, offers many challenges. In this paradigm, machine's self-sustainability due to limited energy capabilities presents a great challenge. Therefore, this paper proposed a low-cost energy harvesting device using rectenna to mitigate the problem in the areas where battery constraint issues arise. So, an energy harvester is designed, optimized, fabricated, and characterized for energy harvesting and IoT applications which simply recycles radio-frequency (RF) energy at 2.4 GHz, from nearby Wi-Fi/WLAN devices and converts them to useful dc power. The physical model comprises of antenna, filters, rectifier, and so on. A rectangular patch antenna is designed and optimized to resonate at 2.4 GHz using the well-known transmission-line model while the band-pass and low-pass filters are designed using lumped components. Schottky diode (HSMS-2820) is used for rectification. The circuit is designed and fabricated using the low-cost FR4 substrate (h = 16 mm and ε
_r
= 4.6) having the fabricated dimensions of 285 mm × 90 mm. Universal software radio peripheral and GNU Radio are employed to measure the received RF power, while similar measurements are carried out using R&S spectrum analyzer for validation. The received measured power is -64.4 dBm at the output port of the rectenna circuit. Hence, our design enables a pervasive deployment of self-operable next-generation IoT devices.