Call for Papers

With 5G starting to be commercially deployed, research in 6G mobile networks has started. One of the major key performance indicators for 6G is its extremely massive connectivity for small devices to enable the so-called Internet of Everything (IoE). Most of these IoE devices will be either battery-powered or battery-less. How to prolong the lifetime of these IoE devices becomes a key challenge. This calls for effort into two complementary areas: 1) energy efficiency to reduce IoE device’s energy consumption and 2) wireless energy transfer (WET) to open up new avenues to provide energy to IoE devices. The former area has been intensively researched under the banner of green communications. It is envisioned that 6G will utilize this research and provide WET to massive IoE devices. Emerging 6G technologies such as THz and intelligent reflective surface (IRS) provide great potential to fulfil this vision of WET. For instance, higher THz frequencies will provide better directionality which is more efficient for WET. Intelligent surfaces may be used actively or passively (using backscattering technique) to transmit or relay signals to IoE devices, enabling battery-less devices. IRS may also be manipulated to enable on-demand WET.

This Feature Topic (FT) solicits papers focusing on wireless energy transfer for IoE devices, in terms of both the infrastructure aspect and the device aspect. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Network architecture to support wireless energy transfer (WET) of IoE devices in future wireless networks
• Protocol and resource allocation algorithms to support WET
• Energy efficient THz-based transceiver design for joint information and energy transfer
• Visible light based transceiver design for joint information and energy transfer
• Battery-less massive access
• Prototype and experimental work for IoE device WET

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines. Please, check these guidelines carefully before submitting since submissions not complying with them will be administratively rejected without review.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the “Mar2022/Wireless Energy Transfer” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles. Please observe the dates specified here below noting that there will be no extension of submission deadline.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 August 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time- extended to 18 August 2021, 3:00 pm US Eastern Time
Decision Notification: 15 November, 2021
Final Manuscript Due: 1 January 2022
Publication Date: March 2022

Guest Editors

Kun Yang
University of Essex, UK

Jie Hu
University of Electronic Sci. and Technology of China (UESTC), China

Burak Kantarci
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada