On the Radio Stripe Deployment for Indoor RF Wireless Power Transfer

One of the primary goals of future wireless systems is to foster sustainability, for which, radio frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) is considered a key technology enabler. The key challenge of RF-WPT systems is the extremely low end-to-end efficiency, mainly due to the losses introduced by the wireless channel. Distributed antenna systems are undoubtedly appealing as they can significantly shorten the charging distances, thus, reducing channel losses. Interestingly, radio stripe systems provide a cost-efficient and scalable way to deploy a distributed multi-antenna system, and thus have received a lot of attention recently. Herein, we consider an RF-WPT system with a transmit radio stripe network to charge multiple indoor energy hotspots, i.e., spatial regions where the energy harvesting devices are expected to be located, including near-field locations. We formulate the optimal radio stripe deployment problem aimed to maximize the minimum power received by the users and explore two specific predefined shapes, namely the straight line and polygon-shaped configurations. Then, we provide efficient solutions relying on geometric programming to optimize the location of the radio stripe elements. The results demonstrate that the proposed radio stripe deployments outperform a central fully-digital square array with the same number of elements and utilizing larger radio stripe lengths can enhance the performance, while increasing the system frequency may degrade it.