ENERGY 2018 - IEEE WORKSHOP ON ENERGY HARVESTING WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

Our environment provides numerous virtually cost-free sources of energy, such as heat, light and wind, which have customarily been exploited to harvest power for human activities. With the push towards making wireless networks more energy efficient as well as regulatory pressures for adopting greener techniques, the use of energy harvesting is also being envisioned in the context of wireless communications. In principle, it can be used to power many elements of the network, including small cells and user terminals, thus increasing both the lifetime of the portable devices as well as the energy efficiency of wireless networks. Although more popular, ambient sources of energy (such as solar and wind) are not the only resource that could be exploited for harvesting purposes. In particular, an abundance of fully controllable sources of energy is naturally present in wireless networks; in the form of massively deployed radio transmitters, which typically broadcast a significant amount of radio frequency (RF) energy to the user devices. This has motivated plethora of research efforts within the wireless communications community aimed at developing wireless energy transfer and harvesting solutions for the fifth generation (5G) networks. The variety of settings in which energy harvesting and transfer technologies are feasible and hence can be adopted in a real network is certainly noteworthy. However, before such techniques can be adopted in practice, it is important to understand their performance limits, interplay with the communication system design, as well as practical implementation constraints.
This workshop aims at bringing researchers together to discuss these opportunities and challenges in the research, design, and engineering of energy harvesting solutions for 5G networks. The workshop will focus on, but will not be limited to, the following topics of interest:
Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer
Information-theoretic fundamentals of energy harvesting communications
Energy cooperation strategies for energy harvesting devices
Network architecture and protocol design for energy harvesting and transfer
Large scale heterogeneous energy harvesting networks
Economics of energy harvesting communications
Stochastic geometry-based approaches to the analysis of energy harvesting communication networks
Waveform optimization for wireless power transfer
Energy harvesting for machine-to-machine (M2M) and device-to-device (D2D) communications
Energy harvesting oriented evolution of PHY layer for 5G networks
Energy harvesting applications and solutions for the Internet of Everything/Things (IoE/IoT)
Energy harvesting and transfer for wireless sensor networks
MAC and routing protocols for energy harvesting systems
Characterization of light, thermal, vibration, RF, motion, wind energy harvesting
Network-wide distributed energy management
Optimal control for energy harvesting systems
Measurement and prediction of energy intake and consumption
Power management circuit and systems for energy harvesting
Prototypes and testbeds of energy harvesting systems and energy transfer technologies