Effect of Power Conversion Efficiency of the RF Energy Harvester on the Security and Data Rate of the Self-Sustainable IoT Devices

This paper presents a study on the impact of the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of RF energy harvesters on the performance of wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices including the sampling rate and data security. An RF energy harvester to harvest energy from the career frequency of 2.64 GHz is designed and prototyped for measurements. A microcontroller unit (MCU) adopts Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) with a 128-bit key for data encryption. Measurement results indicate that as the amount of energy harvested increases, the maximum sampling rate and the security of the data can also increase. It implies the power conversion efficiency (PCE) impacts on both the data rate and data security of self-powered wireless IoT devices.