A new line of research on communications and signals design for Wireless
Power Transfer (WPT) has recently emerged in the communication literature.
Promising signal strategies to maximize the power transfer efficiency of WPT
rely on (energy) beamforming, waveform, modulation and transmit diversity, and
a combination thereof. To a great extent, the study of those strategies has so
far been limited to theoretical performance analysis. In this paper, we study
the real over-the-air performance of all the aforementioned signal strategies
for WPT. To that end, we have designed, prototyped and experimented an
innovative radiative WPT architecture based on Software-Defined Radio (SDR)
that can operate in open-loop and closed-loop (with channel acquisition at the
transmitter) modes. The prototype consists of three important blocks, namely
the channel estimator, the signal generator, and the energy harvester. The
experiments have been conducted in a variety of deployments, including
frequency flat and frequency selective channels, under static and mobility
conditions. Experiments highlight that a channeladaptive WPT architecture based
on joint beamforming and waveform design offers significant performance
improvements in harvested DC power over conventional
single-antenna/multiantenna continuous wave systems. The experimental results
fully validate the observations predicted from the theoretical signal designs
and confirm the crucial and beneficial role played by the energy harvester
nonlinearity.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication
