The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging computing concept that describes a structure in which everyday physical objects, each provided with unique identifiers, are connected to the Internet without requiring human interaction. Long-term and self-sustainable operation are key components for realization of such a complex network, and entail energy-aware devices that are potentially capable of harvesting their required energy from ambient sources. Among different energy harvesting methods, such as vibration, light, and thermal energy extraction, wireless energy harvesting (WEH) has proven to be one of the most promising solutions by virtue of its simplicity, ease of implementation, and availability. In this article, we present an overview of enabling technologies for efficient WEH, analyze the lifetime of WEH-enabled IoT devices, and briefly study the future trends in the design of efficient WEH systems and research challenges that lie ahead.

In cognitive radio networks, the performance of the spectrum sensing depends on the sensing time and the fusion scheme that are used when cooperative sensing is applied. In this paper, we consider the case where the secondary users cooperatively sense a channel using the k -out-of-N fusion rule to determine the presence of the primary user. A sensing-throughput tradeoff problem under a cooperative sensing scenario is formulated to find a pair of sensing time and k value that maximize the secondary users' throughput subject to sufficient protection that is provided to the primary user. An iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal values for these two parameters. Computer simulations show that significant improvement in the throughput of the secondary users is achieved when the parameters for the fusion scheme and the sensing time are jointly optimized.

This paper studies a wireless-energy-transfer (WET) enabled massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system (MM) consisting of a hybrid data-and-energy access point (H-AP) and multiple single-antenna users. In the WET-MM system, the H-AP is equipped with a large number M of antennas and functions like a conventional AP in receiving data from users, but additionally supplies wireless power to the users. We consider frame-based transmissions. Each frame is divided into three phases: the uplink channel estimation (CE) phase, the downlink WET phase, as well as the uplink wireless information transmission (WIT) phase. Firstly, users use a fraction of the previously harvested energy to send pilots, while the H-AP estimates the uplink channels and obtains the downlink channels by exploiting channel reciprocity. Next, the H-AP utilizes the channel estimates just obtained to transfer wireless energy to all users in the downlink via energy beamforming. Finally, the users use a portion of the harvested energy to send data to the H-AP simultaneously in the uplink (reserving some harvested energy for sending pilots in the next frame) . To optimize the throughput and ensure rate fairness, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum rate among all users. In the large-M regime, we obtain the asymptotically optimal solutions and some interesting insights for the optimal design of WET-MM system.

Power line noise is known to affect the performance of broadband power-line communications significantly. This paper presents a frequency-domain approach to characterize and model the statistical variation of power-line noise. The model considers both the background noise and the impulsive noise. The background noise model is based on statistical analysis of the results from two long-term measurements of noise spectrum conducted at two separate sites of a laboratory and a residential apartment. On the other hand, the impulsive noise model is obtained by direct measurements from the noise sources (i.e., various electrical household appliances). The amount of impulse noise reaching a power-line communications (PLC) receiver can then be determined with consideration of the channel transfer characteristics between the noise sources and the PLC receiver. Using these noise models, the performance of two major classes of digital modulation schemes, namely single-carrier modulation and multicarrier modulation, are analyzed and compared. It is found that the multicarrier scheme performs better than the single-carrier scheme when subjected to the observed power-line noise with non-Gaussian statistics.

Recently, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with index modulation (OFDM-IM) was proposed. By selecting a fixed number of subcarriers as active subcarriers to carry constellation symbols, the indices of these active subcarriers may carry additional bits of information. In this paper, we propose two generalization schemes of OFDM-IM, named OFDM with generalized index modulation 1 (OFDM-GIM1) and OFDM-GIM2, respectively. In OFDM-GIM1, the number of active subcarriers in an OFDM subblock is no longer fixed. Dependent on the input binary string, different numbers of active subcarriers are assigned to carry constellation symbols. In OFDM-GIM2, independent index modulation is performed on the in-phase and quadrature component per subcarrier. Through such ways, a higher spectral efficiency than that of OFDM-IM may be achieved. Since both generalization schemes proposed suffer from BER performance loss in low SNR region, an interleaving technique is proposed to tackle this problem. Finally, noting that the two generalization schemes are compatible with each other, the combination of these two schemes, named OFDM-GIM3, has also been investigated. Computer simulation results clearly show our proposed scheme's superiority in both spectral efficiency and BER performance compared to existing works.