Emerging Trends of Energy and Spectrum Harvesting Technologies

Submission Deadline: 31 December 2020

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Emerging Trends of Energy and Spectrum Harvesting Technologies.

Billions of low-end wireless devices, such as sensors, are permeating into almost every aspect of personal life, such as in vehicles, washing machines, air conditioners, etc.  These  miniaturized and low-end devices are a promising solution to collect information and assist users for interaction with real-world objects. Frost & 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 the 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 of devices conflicts with other networks that coexist in the unlicensed spectrum band, which creates the spectrum scarcity issue. To alleviate these energy and spectrum scarcity issues, numerous energy and spectrum harvesting technologies emerge, such as mini solar panel, 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.

The ESH technologies have received much attention from the industry. Numerous commercial products have emerged on the global market, such as self-powered miniaturized devices produced by EnOcean, battery-free Bluetooth tags by Wiliot, and PolarFusion digital radio architecture for extreme low power by Innophase.

However, issues remain in the application of the ESH-enabled devices. First, empowering devices with ESH capabilities increases the manufacturing cost. How can one design cost-efficient, ESH-enabled, embedded architecture with promising performance? Second, considering that both the spectrum sensing and data transmission consume energy, the management of energy and spectrum resource both impact the system performance, which makes resource allocation challenging in ESH-enabled devices. Third, the energy harvesting process and activities of primary users, who own the licensed spectrum, exhibit high dynamics over time. How can one customize the communication protocol to adapt to such high dynamics and guarantee the delivery ratio?

To address these issues, this Special Section solicits original research and practical contributions in ESH technologies. We would like to provide a chance to share ideas and solutions for the enabling techniques which empower the devices with ESH capability. We also highly welcome submissions related to the joint management of energy and spectrum resources.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Architecture design for ESH-enabled systems
  • Data-driven modeling of energy and spectrum harvesting processes
  • Communication protocol design for ESH-enabled networks
  • Hardware design and prototyping of ESH-enabled systems
  • Key scenarios/applications for ESH-enabled IoT devices
  • Convergence of energy and spectrum harvesting
  • Security, privacy, and trust in ESH-enabled systems
  • Reliable data delivery in ESH-enabled systems
  • Simulation platforms for ESH-enabled   systems

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility and downloads of articles.

 

Associate Editor:  Guangjie Han, Hohai University, China

Guest Editors:

    1. Deyu Zhang, Central South University, China
    2. Ning Zhang, Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, USA
    3. Song Guo, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
    4. Geyong Min, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
    5. Shengrong Bu, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
    6. Kanke Gao, Magna International Inc, USA

 

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Energy Harvesting and Scavenging: Technologies, Algorithms, and Communication Protocols
  2. Intelligent and Cognitive Techniques for Internet of Things
  3. Energy Efficient Wireless Communications with Energy Harvesting and Wireless Power Transfer


IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief:
  Prof. Derek Abbott, University of Adelaide

Article submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: hanguangjie@gmail.com.