Journal of Communications and Information Networks

Call for Paper

6G-related standardization is about to start in various international and national organizations, such as 3GPP, ITU, and IMT-2030. One of the major key performance indicators for 6G is its extremely massive connectivity for small devices to enable ubiquitous Internet of Everything (IoE). Most of IoE devices will be either battery-powered or battery-less. How to prolong their lifetime becomes a key challenge. This calls for effort from two complementary aspects: 1) energy efficiency to reduce the IoE networks’ energy consumption, and 2) energy self-supply within the IoE networks to open up flexible and on-demand energy supply to IoE devices. It is envisioned that IoE networks will possess energy self-sustainability in 6G. To make it a reality, tremendous efforts should be invested on both the network side and the device side.

First of all, the network side should have the ability to provide on-demand wireless energy transfer (WET) towards low-power IoE devices in radio-frequency (RF) bands. However, WET will compete for precious air-interface resources with conventional wireless data transfer (WDT). How to balance WET and WDT in the network becomes significant. Coding, modulation, waveform, and beamform should be jointly designed to satisfy both WDT and WET requirements in an energy-efficient manner. Moreover, by considering the array size, carrier frequency, and the distance between the transmitter and the receiver, both plane wave towards far-field devices and spherical wave towards near-field counterparts have to be considered, to improve WET and WDT efficiency.

Second, low-power IoE devices should operate in an energy-efficient manner as well. Backscatter communications are suitable for low-rate but instantaneous WDT services in the uplink, since it does not need any active and energy-consuming RF chains. Its performance should be further improved by jointly designing both the excitation and backscattering waveforms. Wireless-powered communications are suitable for high-rate but delay-tolerant WDT services in the uplink, since it has energy storage units for facilitating harvest-then-transmit protocol. It should be designed towards free-channel estimation, delay reduction, and interplay between the downlink WET and the uplink WDT. Furthermore, novel transceiver architecture of integrated backscatter and wireless-powered communications also needs more attention. The adaptive switch between these two communication modes can let an IoE device energy-efficiently satisfy all kinds of QoS requirements.

Last but not least, realizing energy self-sustainable IoE networks should also merge with state-of-the-art technology in 6G. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces are capable of substantially improving both WET and WDT services. Sensing capability of network infrastructure is capable of accurately positioning low-power IoE devices for WET and WDT beam focusing. Data-driven end-to-end learning is capable of acquiring semantic information about WET and WDT services for generating integrated WET and WDT waveforms. With the accurate prediction of digital twin networks, WET and WDT transceiving strategies can be efficiently designed.

The objective of this special issue is to provide a forum across academia and industry to explore recent advances, research opportunities, and technical challenges in energy self-sustainable IoE networks for 6G. This special issue will bring together leading researchers to present their research in this area including novel ideas, models, methodologies, system designs and architectures, experiments and benchmarks, as well as research surveys. Authors are invited to submit original manuscripts on topics including, but not limited to:

1) Information theory for integrated wireless data and energy transfer;

2) Semantic wireless data and energy transfer;

3) Data-driven wireless data and energy transfer;

4) Waveform design for integrated wireless data and energy transfer;

5) Near-field wireless data and energy transfer;

6) High-efficient backscattering communications;

7) Energy self-sustainable wireless powered communications;

8) Energy self-sustainable massive wireless energy transfer;

9) Age of sensing in wireless powered sensor networks;

10) Digital twin-aided design for energy self-sustainable network design;

11) Multi-domain resource scheduling for energy self-sustainable network;

12) Underwater acoustic data and energy transfer;

13) Underground magnetic induction-based data and energy transfer;

14) Experimental prototype design

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: June 30th, 2024

Initial Decision: July 31st, 2024

Revised Manuscript: September 1st, 2024

Final Decision: September 20th, 2024

Final Upload: September 30th, 2024

Guest editors

Jie Hu, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

Email: hujie@uestc.edu.cn

Derrick Wing Kwan Ng,  University of New South Wales, Australia

Email: w.k.ng@unsw.edu.au

Kun Yang, University of Essex, United Kingdom

Email: kunyang@essex.ac.uk

Yizhe Zhao, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

Email: yzzhao@uestc.edu.cn

Submission Guideline

All original manuscripts to JCIN should be submitted electronically through the Manuscript Central https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jcin