A Mechanism on Energy Harvesting and Data Communications in Wi-Fi Network

RF energy harvesting is a novel technology which is used for harvesting energy from the ambient RF resources. In energy harvesting, harvested energy is converted into useful electrical energy to recharge battery of electronic devices. With energy harvesting scheme, there is no need to replace battery, and the device can be recharged without cable line. Although the energy harvesting technique brings the convenience for recharging the devices, the amount of harvested energy is too small to operate device without supplying energy from the wired resource. In this paper, we consider Wi-Fi signals as energy harvesting resource, where Wi-Fi nodes can harvest energy from ambient signals that are being transmitted by the other users. Not only energy harvesting but also data transmission is considered in this paper. In order to achieve simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) switching circuit is proposed. We measure the received signal strength of Wi-Fi signals in the real environment, and our simulation results show harvested energy and throughput of the nodes in Wi-Fi network