A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY ON RF ENERGY HARVESTING: APPLICATIONS AND PERFORMANCE DETERMINANTS
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Date
2022
Authors
Sherazi, Hafiz Husnain Raza
Zorbas, Dimitrios
O’Flynn, Brendan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Sensors
Abstract
There has been an explosion in research focused on Internet of Things (IoT) devices in
recent years, with a broad range of use cases in different domains ranging from industrial automation
to business analytics. Being battery-powered, these small devices are expected to last for extended
periods (i.e., in some instances up to tens of years) to ensure network longevity and data streams with
the required temporal and spatial granularity. It becomes even more critical when IoT devices are
installed within a harsh environment where battery replacement/charging is both costly and labour
intensive. Recent developments in the energy harvesting paradigm have significantly contributed
towards mitigating this critical energy issue by incorporating the renewable energy potentially
available within any environment in which a sensor network is deployed. Radio Frequency (RF)
energy harvesting is one of the promising approaches being investigated in the research community
to address this challenge, conducted by harvesting energy from the incident radio waves from both
ambient and dedicated radio sources. A limited number of studies are available covering the state
of the art related to specific research topics in this space, but there is a gap in the consolidation of
domain knowledge associated with the factors influencing the performance of RF power harvesting
systems. Moreover, a number of topics and research challenges affecting the performance of RF
harvesting systems are still unreported, which deserve special attention. To this end, this article starts
by providing an overview of the different application domains of RF power harvesting outlining
their performance requirements and summarizing the RF power harvesting techniques with their
associated power densities. It then comprehensively surveys the available literature on the horizons
that affect the performance of RF energy harvesting, taking into account the evaluation metrics,
power propagation models, rectenna architectures, and MAC protocols for RF energy harvesting.
Finally, it summarizes the available literature associated with RF powered networks and highlights
the limitations, challenges, and future research directions by synthesizing the research efforts in the
field of RF energy harvesting to progress research in this area
Description
Keywords
Type of access: Open Access, energy harvesting, RF powered wireless networks, RF-harvesting techniques, energy propagation models, RF circuit design, MAC protocols for RF power harvest