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ZTE Communications ›› 2018, Vol. 16 ›› Issue (1): 11-17.DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2018.01.003

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Design of Wireless Energy-Harvested UHF WSN Tag for Cellular IoT

LI Gang, XU Rui, LI Zhenbing, ZHOU Jie, LI Jian, WEN Guangjun   

  1. Centre for RFIC and System, School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
  • Received:2017-09-07 Online:2018-02-25 Published:2020-03-16
  • About author:LI Gang (ligang1986718@163.com) received his M.E. degree from Chengdu University of Technology, China in 2012. He has five years of research in communication integrated circuits. He has currently been pursuing his Ph.D. degree at School of Communication and Information Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), China since 2016. His research interests include RFID, wireless communication networks, cognitive radio networks, and information security.|XU Rui (xurui_uestc@163.com) is currently pursuing his master’s degree at School of Communication and Information Engineering, UESTC, China. His research interests include programmed algorithm and embedded system, and RFID and IoT.|LI Zhenbing (thomaslizhenbing@163.com) is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at School of Communication and Information Engineering, UESTC, China. His research interests include RFID and IoT, and RF circuit and system.|ZHOU Jie (jie.zhou1994@hotmail.com) is currently pursuing his master’s degree at School of Communication and Information Engineering, UESTC, China. His research interests include RFID and IoT, and RF circuit and system.|LI Jian (uestclijian@163.com) is an associate research fellow at School of Communication and Information Engineering, UESTC, China. His research interests include RFID, IoT, wireless communication systems and networks, and RF circuit and system.|WEN Guangjun (wgj@uestc.edu.cn) received his B.Sc. and the M. E. degrees from Chongqing University, China in 1986 and 1992, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree from UESTC, China in 1998. From July 1986 to February 1995, he was with Chongqing University as a lecturer. He was with UESTC from July 1998 to May 2000, and then with Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute, Korea from May 2000 to May 2001, as a postdoctoral fellow. He was with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as a research fellow from May 2001 to September 2002. He worked for VS Electronic Pte Ltd (Singapore) and Sumitomo Electric Group (Yokohama, Japan) as a senior RF design engineer from September 2002 to August 2005. Since January 2004, he has been a professor with UESTC. His research interests include radio frequency integrated circuits and systems for various wireless communication systems, analysis and design of RFID tag and reader, circuit components and antennas design for the internet of things. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal papers and presented more than 120 conference papers.
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported in part by Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Planning Program (Industrial High-Tech Field) of China under project contracts(No. 2016A010101036);in part by Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Planning Program (Technology Supporting Plan) of China under project contracts(No. 2016GZ0061);in part by Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Planning Program (Technology Supporting Plan) of China under project contracts(No. 2016GZ0116);in part by Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Planning Program (Technology Supporting Plan) of China under project contracts(No. 2017GZ0336);in part by the fundamental research funds for the Central Universities under project contract(No. ZYGX2016Z011);in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under project contracts(No. 61371047);in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under project contracts(No. 61601093);in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under project contracts(No. 61701082)

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Abstract:

In this paper, a wireless energy-harvested ultra-high frequency (UHF) wireless sensor network (WSN) tag is designed and implemented for cellular IoT applications. The WSN tag is made up of a wireless energy harvesting circuit, a temperature sensing circuit, and a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. The developed WSN tag is compatible with the ISO/IEC18000-6C protocol. The WSN tag can receive the GSM RF energy operating in China GSM900 and GSM1800 bands in the surrounding environment and the solar energy, then converts the RF energy to direct current (DC) by schottky diode-based rectifying circuit, and finally stores the DC energy in a supercapacitor through a DC-DC booster circuit. The DC-DC booster circuit drives the front-end circuit, TI MSP430 microcontroller, temperature sensing circuit, and other active circuits in the tag. The MSP430 works in low-power mode when it is powered up, and it can also reduce power consumption more by reducing main clock (MCLK) frequency according to different forward link rates. The implemented WSN tag demonstrated that the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency is higher than 39% when the receiving 900 MHz RF signal power is from -14 dBm to 0 dBm and could make the tag work normally. The signal receiving sensitivity of the WSN tag is up to -32 dBm at the rate of 40 kbit/s from the Reader to the WSN tag. The WSN tag supports Miller coding and extended Miller coding. This wireless energy harvested UHF WSN tag, compared with conventional UHF passive tags and battery-powered active UHF RFID Tags, has many advantages, such as far communication distance, long service life, and sensing functionality. It will have wide applications in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Key words: DC-DC booster circuit, MSP430, RF energy harvest, WSN tag