Radio Frequency Based Wireless Charging for Unsupervised Clustered WSN: System Implementation and Experimental Evaluation

Wireless Charging (WC) is a promising technology that has recently attracted the research community and several companies. WC has a myriad of advantages and diverse applications especially in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where energy harvesting and conservation are very crucial to prolonging network lifetime. Several companies have launched WC products and solutions and made them available to the end-users. This paper provides experimental and practical insights about this technology utilizing off-the-shelf (commercially available) products provided by Powercast Inc.; a pioneering company that has made their wireless charging kits and solutions available to the research and academic communities. In addition, a theoretical study of this technology is presented, where a close match between the theoretical and practical results is demonstrated. This will in turn assist the learners and technology adopters to better understand the technology and adopt it in various application scenarios. Furthermore, the paper presents the potential of using WC in unsupervised clustered WSN, where the Cluster Head (CH) node is proposed to be a mobile Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) equipped with a wireless charging station. The UGV position is chosen to be in the centroid of the cluster in order to ensure that wireless charging takes place in the context of the cluster nodes efficiently.