Safe Charging for wireless power transfer

• Published in: IEEE INFOCOM 2014 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications pp. 1105 - 1113
• Main Authors: Haipeng Dai, Yunhuai Liu, Guihai Chen, Xiaobing Wu, Tian He
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2014
• Subjects: Approximation algorithms; Approximation methods; Conferences; Piecewise linear approximation; Radio frequency; Safety; Wireless communication
• ISSN: 0743-166X; 2641-9874
• DOI: 10.1109/INFOCOM.2014.6848041

As battery-powered mobile devices become more popular and energy hungry, wireless power transfer technology receives intensive interests, as it allows the power to be transferred from a charger to ambient devices wirelessly. The existing studies mainly focus on the power transfer efficiency but overlook the health impairments caused by RF exposure. In this paper, we study the Safe Charging Problem (SCP) of scheduling power chargers so that more energy can be received while no location in the field has electromagnetic radiation (EMR) exceeding a given threshold R t . We prove that SCP is NP-hard and propose a solution which provably outperforms the optimal solution to SCP with a relaxed EMR threshold (1 - ε)R t . Testbed results based on 8 Powercast TX91501 chargers validate our results. Extensive simulation results show that the gap between our solution and the optimal one is only 6.7% when ε = 0.1, while a naive greedy algorithm is 34.6% below our solution.