An all-digital receiver for low power, low bit-rate applications using simultaneous wireless information and power transmission

Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transmission (SWIPT) has been proposed as a feasible solution to enable joint power and data transfer for the nodes of a battery-less wireless networked sensor system. Different from existing approaches, where the incident energy is split between decoding and harvesting blocks at the receiver chain, this paper describes the design and implementation of an all-digital receiver circuit. We leverage the internal control signals of the circuit, targeting ultra-low power consumption, low bit-rate applications in SWIPT. A proof-of-concept receiver is modeled, implemented using off-the-shelf hardware, and validated through extensive experiments. Quantitative results demonstrate the benefits of this joint energy-data reception approach through a single receiver chain, offering bit-rates of 400 bps.