Recent advancements in energy harvesting and its wireless transfer, while enabling a range of new sensing applications, require fundamental rethinking of energy management techniques in sensor networks. Over the past decade, sensor network research has largely been rooted in the paradigm of energy-conscious design in which energy needs to be frugally consumed in applications, protocols, OS, software stack, network architecture, radio, and platform design. Subsequently, many design choices were made to implement energy-conscious sensor networks, such as multihopping, data-centric routing, mesh networking, and in-network aggregation. While technological constraints of the time justified this design, advancement in technologies for energy harvesting and its transfer imply that these early design decisions impacting every aspect of a sensor network now need to be revisited. We thus expect novel architecture proposed to enable microenergy harvesting and its distribution throughout a sensor network.

The purpose of this issue is to provide a synthesized source of recent research results and to serve as a springboard for future work in this emerging area. We invite both theoretical and applied papers.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Microenergy harvesting technology
Novel energy harvesting for battery-less sensing and communication
Wireless energy technologies for sensor networks
Novel architectures for energy distribution and management
Energy routing and loss estimation
Emerging protocols for self-sustainable sensor networking
Mobile and contactless charging of sensor nodes
Novel battery recharging technologies
Mathematical modeling for zero-energy sensor networks
Balanced energy supply and distribution in sensor networks
New hardware platforms, prototypes, and pilot studies on energy storage and distribution
New application paradigms enabled by energy harvesting and wireless distribution
RFID systems with computational and active sensing capabilities
Wireless energy for the Internet of Things