Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances

This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications (Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and Wireless Energy Transfer

Power-Optimal Feedback-Based Random Spectrum Access for an Energy Harvesting Cognitive User

In this paper, we study and analyze cognitive radio networks in which secondary users (SUs) are equipped with Energy Harvesting (EH) capability. We design a random spectrum sensing and access protocol for the SU that exploits the primary link's feedback and requires less average sensing time. Unlike previous works proposed earlier in literature, we do not assume perfect feedback. Instead, we take into account the more practical possibilities of overhearing unreliable feedback signals and accommodate spectrum sensing errors. Moreover, we assume an interference-based channel model where the receivers are equipped with multi-packet reception (MPR) capability. Furthermore, we perform power allocation at the SU with the objective of maximizing the secondary throughput under constraints that maintain certain quality-of-service (QoS) measures for the primary user (PU)