Towards a Real-Time Wireless Powered Communication Network: Design, Implementation and Evaluation

Applying emerging wireless powered communication (WPC) technologies in wireless networks has the potential to significantly reduce the maintenance cost of battery replacement and facilitate device deployment in extreme environments. This paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a real-time wireless powered communication network (RT-WPCN). We present the overall system architecture of RTWPCN and discuss the design challenges of its key hardware and software components, including the wireless powered user device, the beamforming-based hybrid access point (HAP), and the timedivision multiple access (TDMA) based data link layer protocol. We present our solutions to address each of the challenges and describe their implementation details on real hardware. Based on the developed RT-WPCN system, the minimal user throughput maximization problem is formulated and an effective algorithm is proposed to solve it. Extensive expenments are conducted to validate the design principles of RT-WPCN, and thoroughly evaluate its performance at both the component and system levels.