Rectenna design for RF energy harvesting in wireless sensor networks

In the wireless world, wireless power transfer is one of the emerging technologies. Energy harvesting is the reason behind the success of wireless sensor networks. Though wireless sensor networks find lots of applications in agriculture, an industry etc, one of the major constraints is its power consumption. The solution for this problem can be either power consumption reduction or external power supply by means of energy harvesting. Since lots of RF sources are available in the present scenario, this paper concentrates on RF energy harvesting in order to supply power to the wireless sensor nodes. This work presents the design of rectenna which can harvest RF power from two different bands such as 1.8 GHz (GSM band) and 2.4 GHz (ISM band). The designed antenna radiates 3.201 dBm and 4.771 dBm power at 1.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz respectively and these powers are given as input to the rectifier circuit which converts RF power into DC voltage. The rectifier circuit gives Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE) of about 58.545% at 1.8 GHz with the output voltage of 0.459 V for the input 0.839 V. PCE is 83.729% at 2.4 GHz with the output voltage of 0.768 V for the input 0.892 V. Advanced Design System (ADS) 2009 is used for simulation. Diode used here is HSMS-2820 diode from Avago technologies.