Room-Wide Wireless Charging and Load-Modulation Communication via Quasistatic Cavity Resonance

Abstract

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a significant increase in the number of connected devices that stream data in our homes, offices and industrial spaces. However, as the number of these devices increases, the costs of actively maintaining and replacing batteries becomes prohibitive at scale. Recent work on Quasistatic Cavity Resonance (QSCR), offers the possibility of seamless wireless power transfer (WPT) to receivers placed anywhere inside large indoor spaces. This work aims to solve two unexplored and critical missing pieces needed to realize this vision of ubiquitous WPT. First, we demonstrate a full end-to-end QSCR-based WPT system that is capable of simultaneously charging multiple custom designed nodes nearly anywhere in the 4.9 m x 4.9 m x 2.3 m test room. Second, this work utilizes the WPT mechanism as a communication channel, where nodes communicate with a centralized reader and to each other via load modulation. Through analysis and experiments, the proposed system shows that 10 receiver nodes can be safely and efficiently wirelessly charged and the end node to end node communication rate can achieve from 1 kbps without occurring any errors, up to 5 kbps with 6% BER while the end node to central unit can achieve 10 kbps without occurring any errors.