Wireless Energy Harvesting from Urban Electromagnetic Pollution: A Comprehensive Review of Rectenna Architectures, Network Protocols, and Deployment Strategies
Keywords:
Wireless energy harvesting, RF energy, rectenna, electromagnetic pollution, urban RF environment, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), wireless sensor networks, multi-band rectifier, impedance matching, power density, IoT, ambient RF energyAbstract
Wireless energy harvesting (WEH) from urban electromagnetic (EM) pollution is a revolutionary paradigm to power wireless sensor network (WSN) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices sustainably. Combined RF power density in metropolitan cores has been measured as high as 0.227 µW/cm² for sources such as cellular networks, wireless LANs and digital television broadcasting, providing a potentially useful, constant energy supply for ultra-low-power devices. The paper systematically summarizes research works published between 2008 and 2020 in five main categories of rectenna design, impedance matching, multi-band harvesting architectures, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), and cooperative harvesting network protocols. Recently state-of-the-art multi-band stacked rectenna circuits, exhibiting RF-DC conversion efficiencies as high as 84% at frequencies between 0.9 and 2.1 GHz, and 65% at an input power no higher than −25 dBm, have been reported. Through quantitative deployment analyses, it is seen that sensor loads of 10-35 µW can be sustained in nodes within the urban core, which allows battery-free operation for temperature sensing, environmental monitoring and passive RFID. This article looks at critical issues such as power density variability, nonlinear rectifier characteristic and regulatory compliance, and proposes optimization guidelines that are compiled into a single framework for optimizing both individual sensor nodes and cooperative sensor networks for harvesting.References
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