Antenna Coding Optimization for Pixel Antenna Empowered MIMO Wireless Power Transfer

We investigate antenna coding utilizing pixel antennas as a new degree of freedom for enhancing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. The objective is to enhance the output direct current (DC) power under RF combining and DC combining schemes by jointly exploiting gains from antenna coding, beamforming, and rectenna nonlinearity. We first propose the MIMO WPT system model with binary and continuous antenna coding using the beamspace channel model and formulate the joint antenna coding and beamforming optimization using a nonlinear rectenna model. We propose two efficient closed-form successive convex approximation algorithms to efficiently optimize the beamforming. To further reduce the computational complexity, we propose codebook-based antenna coding designs for output DC power maximization based on K-means clustering. Results show that the proposed pixel antenna empowered MIMO WPT system with binary antenna coding increases output DC power by more than 15 dB compared with conventional systems with fixed antenna configuration. With continuous antenna coding, the performance improves another 6 dB. Moreover, the proposed codebook design outperforms previous designs by up to 40% and shows good performance with reduced computational complexity. Overall, the significant improvement in output DC power verifies the potential of leveraging antenna coding utilizing pixel antennas to enhance WPT systems.