RF Energy Harvesting in Minimization of Age of Information with Updating Erasures

This paper presents an investigation into practical considerations in the minimization of Age of Information (AoI) for the system architectures with and without updating feedback. To study the impact of the critical characteristics of the energy harvesters on the computing accuracy of the average AoI, an RF energy harvester with a half-wavelength patch antenna array along with a 3-stage voltage rectifier is designed and prototyped with the center frequency of 2.655 GHz. A cryptography algorithm is also implemented on a mu-controller unit to imitate the behavior of a practical processing unit. The paper shows measurement results and discusses the impact of the non-idealities in the energy harvester on the average AoI of the system. It also shows that the nonlinear power conversion profile of the energy harvester can increase the average AoI to over 300% compared to an ideal and linear energy harvester.