Energy Beamforming in Wireless Powered mmWave Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper studies the beneficial combination of wireless power transfer and millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications in wireless sensor networks. In particular, an mmWave wireless powered sensor network is considered, where the access point (AP) employs beamforming techniques to transfer energy to the sensors of a selected sector of the cell. The served sensors harvest and store energy from the received signal, and use it to power their uplink transmissions. We consider a random energy beamforming scheme but also propose several intelligent schemes that steer the beam to specific areas of the cell by considering the sensors' locations. This setup is investigated from a large-scale point-of-view where spatial randomness is considered with the aid of Poisson point processes. The performance of the network is described in terms of the energy outage probability and the beam outage probability. We show that, depending on the scenario, each of the considered energy beamforming schemes can provide significant gains to the network's performance. Finally, we study an event monitoring application of our theoretical framework, where the active sensors observe a random event in the network and the AP attempts to estimate it based on the received information; this scenario is evaluated in terms of the estimation's mean squared error.