Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Energy Harvester with Adaptive Mode Switching

Abstract

We propose a new heterogeneous reconfigurable energy harvester with an algorithm to control reconfiguration of energy harvester and receive mode, i.e., information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH), so as to enhance EH efficiency and achievable rate for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Especially, we design the heterogeneous reconfigurable energy harvester which consists of low-power and high-power energy harvester (LP/HP-EH) blocks, each comprised of multiple EH circuits in parallel. Practical energy harvesters have their own favorable input range due to turn-on sensitivity and saturation effects. Considering this, we propose a heterogeneous reconfiguration algorithm which optimizes the number of EH circuits being activated and the power-splitting ratio. Further, an adaptive mode switching (MS) problem is formulated which maximizes the achievable rate under the energy-causality condition. Our proposed algorithm can be applied to low-power wide area network (LP-WAN) with wireless EH capability for self-sustainability, thereby realizing battery-free IoT network.