IEEE ACCESS Special Section Editorial: Energy Efficient Wireless Communications With Energy Harvesting and Wireless Power Transfer

With technological advancements, future wireless communications networks are expected to incorporate densely deployed base stations serving tens of billions of low-power wireless devices, in order to enable emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. However, this leads to a dramatic increase in energy cost at the wireless network, and makes it a difficult task to efficiently power massive wireless devices. Therefore, how to reduce the energy cost at the network side and also provide sustainable energy supply at the wireless device side become two increasingly important issues for the success of IoT. Recently, energy harvesting (EH) from ambient sources (e.g., solar and wind) and dedicated wireless power transfer (WPT) via radio frequency (RF) signals have emerged as appealing solutions to power base stations and low-power wireless devices. Such techniques have several promising advantages over the traditional grid/battery-powered systems, such as improved energy efficiency, reduced energy and maintenance costs, prolonged lifetime, and even perpetual and uninterrupted operations. Hence, EH wireless communications and wireless powered communications have attracted signifficant interests recently from both academia and industry.