Evaluation of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer with Distributed Antennas

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) enables sustainable communication networks through exploiting radio signals to transfer data and to generate DC power at remote nodes. Theoretical studies show that physically distributing the transmitter antennas increases the average received power hence improving the energy harvesting efficiency. The advantages are not only limited to energy harvesting, it also increases the quality of the wireless communication by improving the coverage, reliability and the capacity. In this paper we have merged and demonstrated time switching SWIPT using distributed multiple antennas. The results show that it is possible to reach high signal quality whilst efficiently generating DC-power through energy harvesting