A green wireless powered sensor network: An experimental approach

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study of a green wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where sensors with wireless power transfer (WPT) capabilities are located at known positions and an energy transmitter (ETx) is employed to wirelessly power the uplink between the sensors and the access point (AP). By monitoring and measuring the charging time that the sensors require to power their operations, the ETx is turned on and off accordingly for a certain period of time in order to keep the packet transmission rate at a desired constant value. We consider a static and dynamic approach for the measurements and repeat the experiments for various packet rate constraints and different distances between the sensors and the ETx. Our results show that the power consumption of our smart ETx can achieve power savings of 80% compared to an ETx which operates continuously.Index Terms-Wireless power transfer, RF energy harvesting, wireless sensor networks, Powercast.