A Survey of Energy and Spectrum Harvesting Technologies and Protocols for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

Energy harvesting (EH) and spectrum harvesting (SH) are two promising and useful green communication and networking mechanisms for the next-generation wireless networks. While the former techniques exploit ambient energy sources to scavenge energy, the latter exploit the unused or moderately used electromagnetic spectrum. With the advent of cyber-physical systems and the Internet-of-Things (IoT), the presence of tens of billions of low power sensor devices would soon be a reality. These small sensing devices would be present in many systems around us, such as home appliances, telecommunication devices, medical electronics, transport systems, etc. These miniaturized, low-power consuming devices may exploit EH and SH techniques for energy storage and communication. These EH-SH-enabled sensors or low-power nodes need to consume very little energy for sensing and communicating opportunistically. However, several theoretical problems and practical challenges exist in EH-SH communications. In this comprehensive survey paper, we first present the historical background of EH, and SH techniques, and their development over several decades. Specifically, we focus on EH-SH communication technologies and protocols for a wide range of systems and networks. We present a detailed survey of the various harvesting techniques and protocols from recent literature. Finally, we describe exciting open, intra-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary challenges for further research on EH-SH communication technologies.