| dc.description.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. |
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