Energy Efficiency in IoT and Wireless Sensor Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Recent advancements in integrated circuit technology have led to the ubiquitous deployment of new low-cost, tiny sensors and actuators in Internet of Things (IoT) applications like smart homes, smart cities, healthcare, wearables, transportation, security, surveillance, critical infrastructure security, and food safety. To handle the limited onboard energy resources and enable the perpetual network operation of IoT and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), these sensor nodes need to employ energy-efficient communication protocols, and it is necessary to develop optimal energy management policies as well as energy-aware self-organization mechanisms.

On another front, with the growth of these low-cost and high-end wireless devices in the IoT, Quality of Service (QoS)-aware connectivity and energy sustainability have become the two major bottlenecks to be overcome in order to meet the ever-increasing demand for pervasive sustainable computing in advanced wireless sensor networks. As these IoT applications have even stricter QoS requirements, they consume extensive energy, causing very low battery life for high-end mobile devices and eventually contributing to user dissatisfaction. To tackle these problems of pervasive computing and energy sustainability, novel green designs for smart wireless energy harvesting (EH) protocols, both from signal processing and telecommunication networking perspectives, using artificial intelligence tools, are required to allow self-organizability in IoT nodes. Energy-efficient IoT and WSN can reduce the growing environmental footprint of computer networks and information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure due to their significant energy consumption, heavy burden on electric grids, and greenhouse gas emission. So, there has been an increasing need for energy-efficient cooperative multi-antenna transmission schemes to enhance the achievable joint spatial spectrum and energy efficiency performance. More specifically, noting the stringent EH demands, optimal novel energy cooperation techniques such as energy relaying, energy sharing, energy borrowing, energy scavenging, and, more importantly, energy trading, are being explored. Novel massive array processing techniques for supporting energy beamforming, spatial multiplexing, beam alignment, and selection for hybrid architectures are also gaining interest with the aim of minimizing energy dissipation losses. Further, these energy demands of IoT and WSNs can be reduced through efficient cross-layer protocols exploiting energy-aware routing algorithms and power-saving modes at the sensor nodes, in addition to exploring advanced distributed data storage and dissemination to save energy.

This Special Issue aims to bring together the recent developments and original contributions related to Energy Efficiency in IoT and WSNs.

Dr. Deepak Mishra
Guest Editor

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