Communications and Power: Two Sides of One Tapestry
Radio waves carry both energy and information simultaneously. Nevertheless, radio-frequency (RF) transmissions of these quantities have traditionally been treated separately. Future wireless networks will experience a paradigm shift, namely, unifying wireless transmission of information and power to make the best use of the RF spectrum and radiation as well as the network infrastructure for the dual purpose of communicating and energizing. Such networks will enable trillions of future low-power devices to sense, compute, connect, and energize anywhere, anytime, and on the move. The design of such future networks brings new challenges and opportunities for RF, communications, signal processing, machine learning, sensing, and computing. In this talk, I give an overview progress in laying the foundations of the envisioned dual-purpose networks by establishing a signal theory and design for wireless information and power transmission (WIPT) and identifying the fundamental tradeoff between conveying information and power wirelessly.
