Advances in Energy Harvesting Communications: Past, Present, and Future Challenges

TLDR

Green communications have spurred interest in energy harvesting networks, but the intermittent nature of renewable sources poses challenges that recent research has addressed through models, protocols, scheduling, and network implementations, yet a comprehensive survey remains missing. This paper seeks to fill that gap by offering an overview of past and recent developments and proposing future research avenues. It achieves this by reviewing advances across energy sources, models, harvesting and usage protocols, scheduling and optimization, and implementations in cooperative, cognitive radio, multiuser, and cellular networks.

Abstract

Recent emphasis on green communications has generated great interest in the investigations of energy harvesting communications and networking. Energy harvesting from ambient energy sources can potentially reduce the dependence on the supply of grid or battery energy, providing many attractive benefits to the environment and deployment. However, unlike the conventional stable energy, the intermittent and random nature of the renewable energy makes it challenging in the realization of energy harvesting transmission schemes. Extensive research studies have been carried out in recent years to address this inherent challenge from several aspects: energy sources and models, energy harvesting and usage protocols, energy scheduling and optimization, implementation of energy harvesting in cooperative, cognitive radio, multiuser and cellular networks, etc. However, there has not been a comprehensive survey to lay out the complete picture of recent advances and future directions. To fill such a gap, in this paper, we present an overview of the past and recent developments in these areas and highlight a number of possible future research avenues.