Researchers at IIT Mandi have developed wireless powering and communication technologies

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) market have developed remote power and communication technologies for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. “We have developed a cooperative model that allows backscatter communication and radiofrequency energy harvesting (RF-EH) devices to work together to better allocate resources such as time and antenna weight,” said Shivam Gujral, PhD Scholar at School of Computing , IIT Mandi, Dr.

The potential of the proposed system includes various applications such as battery-free wireless cameras, wireless monitors, sensors, skin-attachable sensing platforms, contact lenses, machine-to-machine communication and human-to-machine interaction. The researchers plan to implement a real-time joint radiofrequency power collection-backscatter communication system to analyze the functionality of the system. This will include working on two complementary technology hardware aspects.

The study was led by Siddharth Sarma, Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi, and co-author Gujral.

The team studied two such powering options – radio frequency energy harvesting (RF-EH) and backscatter communication. In RF-EH, energy is transmitted via radio waves to IoT devices by a dedicated transmitter, similar to the waves used in communication for mobile phones. In backscatter communication, as before, energy is transmitted via radio waves, but with or without the need for a dedicated transmitter. Instead, RF signals available in the vicinity, such as WiFi, cell phone signals, etc., are used by reflections and backscatters to power IoT objects.

“We used a dedicated power transmitter for both devices, where the backscatter device transmitted data via a monostatic configuration and the RFEH device via the HTT protocol. The team used extensive numerical simulations to establish the superiority of the proposed cooperative scheme over existing schemes. In these simulations, the key parameters for analyzing the model’s performance were different, “said Sarma.

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