A Compact RF Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Node with an Energy Intensity Adaptive Management Algorithm

This paper presents a compact RF energy harvesting wireless sensor node with the antenna, rectifier, energy management circuits, and load integrated on a single printed circuit board and a total size of 53 mm x 59.77 mm x 4.5 mm. By etching rectangular slots in the radiation patch, the antenna area is reduced by 13.9%. The antenna is tested to have an S11 of -24.9 dB at 2.437 GHz and a maximum gain of 4.8 dBi. The rectifier has a maximum RF-to-DC conversion efficiency of 52.53% at 7 dBm input energy. The proposed WSN can achieve self-powered operation at a distance of 13.4 m from the transmitter source. To enhance the conversion efficiency under different input energy densities, this paper establishes an energy model for two operating modes and proposes an energy-intensity adaptive management algorithm. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed WSN can effectively distinguish between the two operating modes based on input energy intensity and realize efficient energy management.

Automated summary

This paper presents a compact RF energy harvesting wireless sensor node with integrated antenna, rectifier, energy management circuits, and load on a single printed circuit board. It achieves efficient energy management and has a small size.