Title: Wireless Powered Communications: Overview,Recent Results, and Challenges

Abstract: Conventional energy-constrained wireless systems such as sensor networks are powered by batteries and have limited lifetime. Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology for energy sustainable networks, where terminals can harvest energy from dedicated electromagnetic radiation through appropriate electronic circuits. The integration of WPT technology into communication networks introduces a fundamental co-existence of information and energy flows; radio-frequency signals are used in order to convey information and/or energy. The efficient management of these two flows through sophisticated networking protocols, signal processing/communication techniques and network architectures, gives rise to a new communication paradigm called wireless powered communications (WPC).  In this talk, we discuss the principles of WPC and we highlight its main network architectures as well as the fundamental trade-off between information and energy transfer. Several examples, which deal with the integration of WPC in modern communication systems, are presented.