Concept of Mean Effective Gain for Optimizing Ambient Energy-Harvesting Antennas

This paper introduces the Mean Effective Gain (MEG) as a key parameter for optimizing the performances of RF energy harvesting antennas. This parameter is computed for various kinds of antennas based on full-wave simulations. It is seen that the three-orthogonal-arm dipole has a stable MEG (around -3dB) independently to the incident cross-power ratio. This interesting characteristic makes it a good candidate for collecting ambient RF energy without power shutdown within a random environment. Experiments will be conducted further.