Positive Impact of Interference on RF Energy Harvesting for IoT Devices

In today's wireless networks, interference serves as a harmful factor that can notably degrade the overall performance. Nevertheless, interference can also be beneficial when utilized as an additional power source for radio frequency (RF) based energy harvesting in order to charge Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this paper, we quantify the positive impact of interference for energy harvesting using tools from stochastic geometry; in particular, we derive an expression for a suitable success probability metric and validate its accuracy using Monte-Carlo simulations as a function of various system parameters. Moreover, we design, implement and evaluate an experimental test bed for RF-based energy harvesting using WiFi access points (APs) in order to demonstrate the practical performance gains resulting from interference as a function of the number of access points, their relative locations, and the receivers antenna configuration. The obtained experimental measurement results corroborate the insights extracted from the analytical derivations.