Implementation of Multi-Path Energy Routing

Harvesting energy from radio frequency (RF) waves brings us closer to achieving the goal for perpetual operation of a wireless sensor network (WSN) by replenishing the batteries of the sensor nodes. However, due to restrictions on the maximum transmitted power, path loss, and receiver sensitivity, only a small amount of energy can be harvested. While a dedicated RF source alleviates the problem to some extent, novel techniques are required to boost the energy transfer efficiency of the source. In this paper, we provide the first experimental demonstration of multi-path energy routing (MPER) for the case of a sparsely distributed WSNs and show its improved performance over direct energy transfer (DET). In addition, we extend this concept to the case of densely distributed WSNs and experimentally demonstrate and compare the gains obtained by 2- and 3-path energy routing over DET. Our experimental results show that significant energy gains can be achieved in a dense network deployment even when the node to be charged is partially blocked by the neighboring nodes.