Wireless Power Transfer Technologies, Applications, and Future Trends: A Review

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is a disruptive technology that allows wireless energy provisioning for energy-limited IoT devices, thus decreasing the over-reliance on batteries and wires. WPT could replace conventional energy provisioning (e.g., energy harvesting) and expand to be deployed in many of our daily-life applications, including but not limited to healthcare, transportation, automation, and smart cities. As a new rising technology, WPT has attracted many researchers from academia and industry about WPT technologies and wireless charging scheduling algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we review the most recent studies related to WPT, including classifications, advantages, disadvantages, and main domains of application. Furthermore, we review the recently designed wireless charging scheduling algorithms (schemes) for wireless sensor networks. Our study provides a detailed survey of wireless charging scheduling schemes covering the main scheme classifications, evaluation metrics, application domains, advantages, and disadvantages of each charging scheme. We further summarize trends and opportunities for applying WPT at some intersections.

I. Introduction

Sixth Generation (6G) wireless networks seek to enhance the dependability, speed, and bandwidth of their forerunners, the 5G networks, in order to meet the expanding demands of the Internet of Everything (IoE) applications and accommodate cutting-edge technological trends like decentralized and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). Energy efficiency and power provisioning are critical problems in future wireless networking, including Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), IoE, Beyond 5G (B5G), and 6G [1].