Analysis and Experiment on Multi-Antenna-to-Multi-Antenna RF Wireless Power Transfer

In this paper, we provide a tool for predicting the power transfer efficiency of radio-frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT). With its capability of long-range wireless power transfer, RF WPT is considered as a very promising recharging technique for powering low-power internet of things (IoT) devices. The prediction of the power transfer efficiency is a prerequisite for setting up a proper design goal of RF WPT systems. We propose an analytic method that enables to calculate the efficiency in various multi-antenna-to-multi-antenna WPT scenarios with arbitrary positions and attitudes of antenna arrays. We have built a prototype RF WPT system with 64 transmit and 16 receive antennas, the operating frequency of which is 5.8 GHz, and verified the accuracy of the proposed analysis.