Wireless power transfer and applications to sensor networks

Energy constraints are widely regarded as a fundamental limitation of wireless and mobile devices. For sensor networks, a limited lifetime due to battery constraint poses a performance bottleneck and barrier for large scale deployment. Recently, wireless power transfer has emerged as a promising technology to address energy and lifetime bottlenecks in a sensor network. In this article, we give a review of the history of wireless power transfer and describe its recent developments. We show how such technologies can be applied to sensor networks and address their energy constraints.