Wireless Communications Design with Energy Harvesting

Abstract

The installation of trillion sensors will realize a connected society able to provide never-before-seen public services, such as disaster prediction by exploiting massive data via machine-learning. However, large-scale deployments of battery-driven sensors will cause unacceptably huge maintenance costs because of the finite amount of energy in the batteries. Harvesting energy from natural phenomena such as light, heat, vibration, chemical reaction, and radio waves is a promising solution for overcoming this limitation and enabling perpetual operations of sensors. Since energy harvesting (EH) is inherently unstable and uncontrollable, the design of wireless communication with EH is different from that with a stable power source. In this paper, the basics of EH technologies are introduced and a brief survey of recent results on communications design with EH technologies for different network topologies is provided.