Currently, massive data communication and computing pose a severe challenge on existing wireless network architecture, from various aspects such as data rate, latency, energy consumption and pricing. Hence, it is of vital importance to investigate active wireless transmission for wireless networks. To this end, we first overview the data rate of wireless active transmission. We then overview the latency of wireless active transmission, which is particularly important for the applications of monitoring services. We further overview the spectral efficiency of the active transmission, which is particularly important for the battery-limited Internet of Things (IoT) networks. After these overviews, we give several critical challenges on the active transmission, and we finally present feasible solutions to meet these challenges. The work in this paper can serve as an important reference to the wireless networks and IoT networks.