PDF Special Issue on Autonomous Battery-Free Sensing and Communication
Recently, energy harvesting technologies have emerged as a solution to the challenges posed by energy constraints in many mobile applications. Environmental energy, from sources such as solar, wind, radio frequency, and temperature gradient can be harvested and stored for sustainable operation, thereby enabling battery-free nodes. Such nodes can be applicable in scenarios where small device volume and perpetual operation are desirable. Moreover, they have the potential to enable autonomous sensing and communications tasks without human intervention following the deployment. However, challenges are posed by the need to coordinate the sensing and communications among battery-free nodes while guaranteeing the system performance. Since the harvesting of energy is typically hard to predict, some preliminary works designed efficient energy management schemes. Yet, designing new architectures that enable autonomous battery-free sensing and communications is an open problem.
The objective of this special issue is to capture the state-of-the-art advances in this area, and foster new avenues for research. The potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- New energy harvesting technologies for battery-free systems
- Energy management for perpetual operation
- New architectures for battery-free sensing and communications
- Resource management for autonomous operations
- Operating systems for battery-free devices
- Security issues in battery-free systems
- Emerging applications by battery-free systems
- Future directions for battery-free systems