A Generic Receiver Architecture for MIMO Wireless Power Transfer With Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This letter investigates a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless power transfer (WPT) system under practical non-liner energy harvesting (EH) models. We propose a new generic energy receiver (ER) architecture consisting of $N$ receive antennas and $L$ rectifiers, for which one power splitter is inserted after each antenna to adaptively split the received radio frequency (RF) signals among the $L$ rectifiers for efficient non-linear RF-to-direct current (DC) conversion. With the proposed architecture, we maximize the total harvested DC power at the ER, by jointly optimizing the transmit energy beamforming at the energy transmitter (ET) and the power splitting ratios at the ER. Numerical results show that our proposed design by exploiting the nonlinearity of EH significantly improves the harvested DC power at the ER, as compared to two conventional designs.