Review on Energy Harvesting Techniques for Future Wireless Generation Networks

World is experiencing an explosive growth in wireless communication and wireless networks which has led to a huge increase in the energy consumption. In low-power scenarios like wireless sensors and networks, it is highly impractical or expensive to replace batteries of low-cost devices. To overcome these problems, relying on energy harvesting has proved to be the best solution and this is due to the potential for mobile devices to scan power from their surrounding that is solar, wind, vibration, thermo-electric effects, ambient radio power and so on. The use of Energy harvesting nodes in wireless communication is a promising approach for maximizing the energy efficiency. However, it requires signal processing algorithms and allied architectures to harvest the energy along with the information transfer. This paper deals with a comprehensive presentation of new research contributions on Wireless Energy Harvesting techniques, algorithms, architectures, performance metrics, and applications which are suitable for future wireless networks. Different architectures are examined in this paper that imposes optimization targets on various parameters that are very much essential to design energy efficient high speed wireless systems.