Analysis and Experimental Validation of the WPT Efficiency of the Both-Sides Retrodirective System

The retrodirective antenna array is considered as a mechanism to enable target tracking of a power receiver for long range wireless power transfer (WPT) due to its simplicity in implementation using only analog circuits. By installing the retrodirective capability on both the generator and rectenna arrays, a feedback loop that produces a high efficiency WPT channel is created. In this paper, we characterize the dynamics of this phenomenon using a discrete-time state-space model based on S-parameters and show that the system can naturally achieve maximum theoretical WPT efficiency. We further confirmed the theoretical analysis through a hardware experiment using a 12-port circuit board with measurable S-parameters mimicking a static wireless channel. The results collected from the hardware experiment show agreement with the proposed theoretical framework by comparing the theoretical efficiency with the measured efficiency and by showing that the collected data points follow the predicted condition to achieve maximum efficiency.