On the Deployment of Distributed Antennas for Wireless Power Transfer with Safety Electromagnetic Radiation Level Requirement

Abstract: The extremely low efficiency is regarded as the bottleneck of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology. To tackle this problem, either enlarging the transfer power or changing the infrastructure of WPT system could be an intuitively proposed way. However, the drastically important issue on the user exposure of electromagnetic radiation is rarely considered while we try to improve the efficiency of WPT. In this paper, a Distributed Antenna Power Beacon (DA-PB) based WPT system where these antennas are uniformly distributed on a circle is analyzed and optimized with the safety electromagnetic radiation level (SERL) requirement. In this model, three key questions are intended to be answered: 1) With the SERL, what is the performance of the harvested power at the users ? 2) How do we configure the parameters to maximize the efficiency of WPT? 3) Under the same constraints, does the DA-PB still have performance gain than the Co-located Antenna PB (CA-PB)? First, the minimum antenna height of DA-PB is derived to make the radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic radiation power density at any location of the charging cell lower than the SERL published by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Second, the closed-form expressions of average harvested Direct Current (DC) power per user in the charging cell for pass-loss exponent 2 and 4 are also provided. In order to maximize the average efficiency of WPT, the optimal radii for distributed antennas elements (DAEs) are derived when the pass-loss exponent takes the typical value $2$ and $4$. For comparison, the CA-PB is also analyzed as a benchmark. Simulation results verify our derived theoretical results. And it is shown that the proposed DA-PB indeed achieves larger average harvested DC power than CA-PB and can improve the efficiency of WPT.