Wireless information and power transfer for communication recovery in disaster areas

When a disaster happens, the communication network is very likely to be damaged. Since communication is critical for coordinating the operations of disaster recovery, restoring the communication network is always the first priority. In many situations, however, the breakdown of the communication network results from the cutoff of the power network, and it is difficult to recover the power network in a short time. In this paper, we propose a wireless information and power transfer scheme such that the communication network can be recovered without firstly restoring the power network. Challenges of the proposed scheme are discussed.