Design Principles of Batteryless Transponder for Vehicular DSRC at 5.8 GHz

This article presents design principles for a totally batteryless and cost-effective wireless transponder, based on commercially-of-the-shelf (COTS) components. The transponder architecture is compliant with the physical layers of most common vehicular dedicated short range communications (DSRC) applications operating at 5.8 GHz. The paper is organized in two parts. We discuss firstly the design principles and system architecture, which includes both the energy harvesting and the back-scattering modes. The second part introduces a batteryless transponder prototype for vehicular DSRC, as result of the discussed design principles. In this part of the article reports a full set of experimental results, illustrating the consistency with the design principles, as well as the effective performance in terms of power consumption, energy efficiency and radio communication capabilities. In particular we report that at the distance of 1.05 m, a legacy road-side unit can establish both the down-link and up-link, with the latter requiring 37 s of charging time to enable 68 ms of data link at 8 Mbps.