REHSense: Towards Battery-Free Wireless Sensing via Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting
Tao Ni (City University of Hong Kong)
Zehua Sun (City University of Hong Kong)
Mingda Han (Shandong University)
Guohao Lan (TU Delft - Embedded Systems)
Yaxiong Xie (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)
Zhenjiang Li (City University of Hong Kong)
Tao Gu (Macquarie University)
Weitao Xu (City University of Hong Kong)
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Abstract
Diverse Wi-Fi-based wireless applications have been proposed, ranging from daily activity recognition to vital sign monitoring. Despite their remarkable sensing accuracy, the high energy consumption and the requirement for customized hardware modification hinder the wide deployment of the existing sensing solutions. In this paper, we propose REHSense, an energy-efficient wireless sensing solution based on Radio-Frequency (RF) energy harvesting. Instead of relying on a power-hungry Wi-Fi receiver, REHSense leverages an RF energy harvester as the sensor and utilizes the voltage signals harvested from the ambient Wi-Fi signals to enable simultaneous context sensing and energy harvesting. We design and implement REHSense using a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) RF energy harvester. Extensive evaluation of three fine-grained wireless sensing tasks (i.e., respiration monitoring, human activity recognition, and hand gesture recognition) shows that REHSense can achieve comparable sensing accuracy with conventional Wi-Fi-based solutions while adapting to different sensing environments, reducing the power consumption of sensing by 98.7% and harvesting up to 4.5 mW of power from RF energy.