Leveraging mmWave 5G to Wirelessly Power IoT Devices

One of the IMT-2020 or 5G requirements is to be able to support 1 million devices / sq. km. This is 10 fold as compared to 4G/LTE. To support these many devices

1. Design devices with longer/efficient battery that can last much longer
2. Make the technology efficient enough so it consumes tiny amount of energy 
3. Design devices so that they can be charged automatically. This could be in multiple ways:
1. Solar powered
2. Wireless charging
3. Wirelessly powered

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a way to tap into the over-capacity of 5G networks, turning them into “a wireless power grid” for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices that today need batteries to operate. A news article on their website said:

The Georgia Tech inventors have developed a flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna (rectenna) system capable, for the first time, of millimeter-wave harvesting in the 28-GHz band. (The Rotman lens is key for beamforming networks and is frequently used in radar surveillance systems to see targets in multiple directions without physically moving the antenna system.)

But to harvest enough power to supply low-power devices at long ranges, large aperture antennas are required. The problem with large antennas is they have a narrowing field of view. This limitation prevents their operation if the antenna is widely dispersed from a 5G base station. 

“We’ve solved the problem of only being able to look from one direction with a system that has a wide angle of coverage,” said senior researcher Aline Eid in the ATHENA lab, established in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering to advance and develop novel technologies for electromagnetic, wireless, RF, millimeter-wave, and sub-terahertz applications. 

The findings were reported in the Jan.12 issue of the journal Scientific Reports.

The FCC has authorized 5G to focalize power much more densely compared with  previous generations of cellular networks. While today’s 5G was built for high-bandwidth communication, the high-frequency network holds rich opportunity to “harvest” unused power that would otherwise be wasted. 

With the Georgia Tech solution, all the electromagnetic energy collected by the antenna arrays from one direction is combined and fed into a single rectifier, which maximizes its efficiency.  

“People have attempted to do energy harvesting at high frequencies like 24 or 35 Gigahertz before,” Eid said, but such antennas only worked if they had line of sight to the 5G base station; there was no way to increase their angle of coverage until now.

Operating just like an optical lens, the Rotman lens provides six fields of view simultaneously in a pattern shaped like a spider. Tuning the shape of the lens results in a structure with one angle of curvature on the beam-port side and another on the antenna side. This enables the structure to map a set of selected radiation directions to an associated set of beam-ports. The lens is then used as an intermediate component between the receiving antennas and the rectifiers for 5G energy harvesting. 

This novel approach addresses the tradeoff between rectenna angular coverage and turn-on sensitivity with a structure that merges unique radio frequency (RF) and direct current (DC) combination techniques, thereby enabling a system with both high gain and large beamwidth.

In demonstrations, Georgia Tech’s technology achieved a 21-fold increase in harvested power compared with a referenced counterpart, while maintaining identical angular coverage. 

This robust system may open the door for new passive, long-range, mm-wave 5G-powered RFID for wearable and ubiquitous IoT applications. The researchers used inhouse additive manufacturing to print the palm-sized mm-wave harvesters on a multitude of everyday flexible and rigid substrates. Providing 3D and inkjet printing options will make the system more affordable and accessible to a broad range of users, platforms, frequencies, and applications.

Here are the researchers, explaining their invention

Here is another much more detailed video in which Professor Manos Tentzeris, Ken Byers Professor in flexible electronics at GA Tech; Aline Eid, Graduate Research Assistant at GA Tech; and Jimmy Hester, CTO and Co-Founder at AtherAxon join Pat Hindle and Gary Lerude from Microwave Journal to discuss their research that lead to the development of Rotman lens-based rectennas capable of mmWave/5G Energy Harvesting at 28 GHz With high efficiency and from all directions.

These kind of technologies can be really handy for the hyper-connected future where we expect sensors in everything and everything connected to everything else. It may be long way away but we better start working on them sooner rather than later.