IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Emerging Trends of Energy and Spectrum Harvesting Technologies

Guangjie Han,Kanke Gao,Song Guo,Shengrong Bu,Deyu Zhang,Geyong Min,Ning Zhang

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3105788

Abstract

Billions of low-end wireless devices, such as sensors, are permeating into almost every aspect of personal life, such as vehicles, washing machines, and air conditioners. These miniaturized and low-end devices are a promising solution to collect information and assist users in interacting with real-world objects. Frost and Sullivan reported that the global market of miniaturized devices is forecast to increase from 1.4 billion to 3.26 billion from 2014 to 2024. Unfortunately, the performance of miniaturized devices, which generally operate with limited battery power and transmit data over an unlicensed spectrum, is highly deteriorated due to resource scarcity issues in terms of energy and spectrum. The energy scarcity issue limits the longevity of devices and requires the operator to manually replace the depleted battery, which results in considerable maintenance costs. Even with sufficient energy supply, data transmission conflicts with other networks that coexist in the unlicensed spectrum band, leading to spectrum scarcity issues. To alleviate these energy and spectrum scarcity issues, numerous energy and spectrum harvesting technologies have emerged, such as mini solar panels, piezoelectric transducers, and cognitive radio. By embedding these modules, the devices can harvest energy from the ambient energy sources and explore the idle licensed spectrum for data transmission, leading to energy and spectrum harvesting-enabled devices.

Highlights

The article by Adil et al, ‘‘An efficient load balancing scheme of energy gauge nodes to maximize the lifespan of constraint oriented networks,’’ presents an energy gauge node (EGN)-based communication infrastructure
The energy scarcity issue limits the longevity of devices and requires the operator to manually replace the depleted battery, which results in considerable maintenance costs
The analysis indicates that the proposed scheme withstands several known attacks as compared to recent benchmark schemes

Summary

Introduction

The article by Adil et al, ‘‘An efficient load balancing scheme of energy gauge nodes to maximize the lifespan of constraint oriented networks,’’ presents an energy gauge node (EGN)-based communication infrastructure. In the article ‘‘Time allocation optimization and trajectory design in UAV-assisted energy and spectrum harvesting network,’’ by Shi et al, the authors propose an unaligned time allocation scheme (UTAS) in which the uplink phase and downlink phase of nearby SUs and remote SUs are unaligned to achieve more flexible time for scheduling.

Results

Conclusion