Integrated wireless communications and wireless power transfer: An overview

As an important application of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication systems, Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted worldwide research interests. Since most of the communication devices in IoT are powered by batteries, these devices always have limited operation time. Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, which can transfer power over a wireless medium (without any wires), can avoid the need to manually replace or recharge the batteries of the wireless devices in IoT. For electromagnetic (EM) radiation-based WPT, since radio-frequency (RF) signals that transport energy can at the same time be used for wireless communications, integrated wireless communications and WPT becomes a new research area which has attracted great research interests. In this paper, we first introduce two main research paradigms for integrated wireless communications and WPT, i.e., simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and wireless-powered communication network (WPCN). Then we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of both SWIPT and WPCN, respectively. Finally, we point out the new and challenging future research direction.