Sensors (Jul 2022)
Boosting Quantum Battery-Based IoT Gadgets via RF-Enabled Energy Harvesting
Abstract
The search for a highly portable and efficient supply of energy to run small-scale wireless gadgets has captivated the human race for the past few years. As a part of this quest, the idea of realizing a Quantum battery (QB) seems promising. Like any other practically tractable system, the design of QBs also involve several critical challenges. The main problem in this context is to ensure a lossless environment pertaining to the closed-system design of the QB, which is extremely difficult to realize in practice. Herein, we model and optimize various aspects of a Radio-Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting (EH)-assisted, QB-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) system. Several RF-EH modules (in the form of micro- or nano-meter-sized integrated circuits (ICs)) are placed in parallel at the IoT receiver device, and the overall correspondingly harvested energy helps the involved Quantum sources achieve the so-called quasi-stable state. Concretely, the Quantum sources absorb the energy of photons that are emitted by a photon-emitting device controlled by a micro-controller, which also manages the overall harvested energy from the RF-EH ICs. To investigate the considered framework, we first minimize the total transmit power under the constraints on overall harvested energy and the number of RF-EH ICs at the QB-enabled wireless IoT device. Next, we optimize the number of RF-EH ICs, subject to the constraints on total transmit power and overall harvested energy. Correspondingly, we obtain suitable analytical solutions to the above-mentioned problems, respectively, and also cross-validate them using a non-linear program solver. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is reported in the form of numerical results, which are both theoretical and simulations based, by taking a range of operating system parameters into account.
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