• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.221-225
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• 2014

Low power RF devices, such as RFID and Zigbee, are important for ubiquitous sensing. These devices, however, are powered by portable energy sources, such as batteries, which limits their use. To mitigate this problem, this study developed RF energy harvesting with W-CDMA for a low power RF device. Diodes are required with a low turn on voltage because the diode threshold is larger than the received peak voltage of the rectifying antenna (rectenna). Therefore, a Schottky diode HSMS-286 was used. A prototype of RF energy harvesting device showed the maximum gain of 5.8dBi for the W-CDMA signal. The 16 patch antennas were manufactured with a 10 dielectric constant PTFT board. In low power RF devices, the transmitter requires a step-up voltage of 2.5~5V with up to 35 mA. To meet this requirement, the Texas Instruments TPS61220 was used as a low input voltage step-up converter. From the evaluated result, the achievable incident power of the rectenna at 926mV to operate Zigbee can be obtained within a distance of 12m.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.3412-3432
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• 2019

Recent advances in radio frequency (RF) power transfer provide a promising technology to power sensor nodes. Adoption of mobile chargers to replenish the nodes' energy has recently attracted a lot of attention and the mobility assisted energy replenishment provides predictable and sustained power service. In this paper, we study the joint optimization of mobile charging and data gathering in sensor networks. A wireless multi-functional vehicle (WMV) is employed and periodically moves along specified trajectories, charge the sensors and gather the sensed data via one-hop communication. The objective of this paper is to maximize the uplink throughput by optimally allocating the time for the downlink wireless energy transfer by the WMV and the uplink transmissions of different sensors. We consider two scenarios where the WMV moves in a straight line and around a circle. By time discretization, the optimization problem is formulated as a 0-1 programming problem. We obtain the upper and lower bounds of the problem by converting the original 0-1 programming problem into a linear programming problem and then obtain the optimal solution by using branch and bound algorithm. We further prove that the network throughput is independent of the WMV's velocity under certain conditions. Performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results validate the correctness of our proposed theorems and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms two baseline algorithms in achieved throughput under different settings.