A Maritime Wireless Communication Primitive Power-supplied by GPS

摘要

As global positioning systems (GPS) are becoming ubiquitous, GPS signals are populating the space. While such signals have exclusively been used in localization services in the first place, we take the first step in turning them to energy sources for maritime communication. Specifically, we leverage antennas deployed on ships to harvest energy from such ambient GPS signals, which are also fed into encoders to carry information bits. This way, maritime communication can be built completely battery-free all day long. Also, it it because the communication takes place on the ocean, where no interference is introduced, except for the original GPS signals to the backscattered GPS signals, the design of the transceiver under certain energy budget is simplified. In this paper, we show the theoretical promise that the system would work using electromagnetic theories, and introduce our prototype which proves the concept in real world settings.