Guest Editoral Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Transmission of Information and Power

Wireless Power transfer (WPT) and wireless information and power transfer (WIPT) have received growing attention in the research community in the past few years. In this special issue, a total of fourteen papers present state-of-the-art results in the broad area of wireless transmission of information and power with a special emphasis on signal processing advances.

The special issue starts with a guest editor-authored tutorial overview paper that reviews the signal processing, machine learning, sensing, and computing techniques, challenges and opportunities in future networks based on WPT and WIPT. The tutorial paper is then followed by thirteen technical papers.

The tutorial overview paper first reviews recent signal processing techniques to make WPT and WIPT as efficient as possible. Topics include high-power amplifier and energy harvester nonlinearities, active and passive beamforming, intelligent reflecting surfaces, receive combining with multi-antenna harvester, modulation, coding, waveform, large-scale (massive) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), channel acquisition, transmit diversity, multi-user power region characterization, coordinated multipoint, and distributed antenna systems. Then, the paper looks at two different design methodologies: the model and optimize approach relying on analytical system models, modern convex optimization, and communication/information theory, and the learning approach based on data-driven end-to-end learning and physics-based learning. The pros and cons of each approach are discussed. Finally, the paper identifies new emerging wireless technologies where WPT may play a key role—wireless-powered mobile edge computing and wireless-powered sensing—arguing WPT, communication, computation, and sensing must be jointly designed.