Magnetic MIMO Signal Processing and Optimization for Wireless Power Transfer

Abstract

Abstract-In magnetic resonant coupling (MRC) enabled multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless power transfer (WPT) systems, multiple transmitters (TXs) each with one single coil are used to enhance the efficiency of simultaneous power transfer to multiple single-coil receivers (RXs) by constructively combining their induced magnetic fields at the RXs, a technique termed "magnetic beamforming". In this paper, we study the optimal magnetic beamforming design in a multi-user MIMO MRC-WPT system. We introduce the multi-user power region that constitutes all the achievable power tuples for all RXs, subject to the given total power constraint over all TXs as well as their individual peak voltage and current constraints. We characterize each boundary point of the power region by maximizing the sum-power deliverable to all RXs subject to their minimum harvested power constraints, which are proportionally set based on a given power-profile vector to ensure fairness. For the special case without the TX peak voltage and current constraints, we derive the optimal TX current allocation for the single-RX setup in closed-form as well as that for the multi-RX setup by applying the techniques of semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and time-sharing. In general, the problem is a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP), which is difficult to solve. For the case of one single RX, we show that the SDR of the problem is tight, and thus the problem can be efficiently solved. For the general case with multiple RXs, based on SDR we obtain two approximate solutions by applying the techniques of timesharing and randomization, respectively. Moreover, for practical implementation of magnetic beamforming, we propose a novel signal processing method to estimate the magnetic MIMO channel due to the mutual inductances between TXs and RXs. Numerical results show that our proposed magnetic channel estimation and adaptive beamforming schemes are practically effective, and can significantly improve the power transfer efficiency and multi-user performance trade-off in MIMO MRC-WPT systems compared to the benchmark scheme of uncoordinated WPT with fixed identical TX current.

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