On the Optimal Deployment of Power Beacons for Massive Wireless Energy Transfer

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is emerging as an enabling green technology for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. WET allows the IoT devices to wirelessly recharge their batteries with energy from external sources such as dedicated radio-frequency transmitters called power beacons (PBs). In this article, we investigate the optimal deployment of PBs that guarantees a network-wide energy outage constraint. Optimal positions for the PBs are determined by maximizing the average incident power for the worst location in the service area since no information about the sensor deployment is provided. Such network planning guarantees the fairest harvesting performance for all the IoT devices. Numerical simulations evidence that our proposed optimization framework improves the energy supply reliability compared to benchmark schemes. Additionally, we show that although both, the number of deployed PBs and the number of antennas per PB, introduce performance improvements, the former has a dominant role. Finally, our proposal allows to extend the coverage area while keeping the total power budget fixed, which additionally reduces the level of electromagnetic radiation in the vicinity of PBs.