Backscatter-assisted Wireless Powered Communication Networks with Multiple Antennas

Backscatter communication (BC) and wireless powered communication (WPC) are the two revolutionized technologies conceived as a promising technological solution to realize future Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. By integrating BC into the WPC system enables more efficient utilization of the network resources, and also it improves the system performance significantly. In this paper, we developed a BC assisted WPC network, so-called BC-WPCN, which consists of multiple energy-constrained sensor nodes (SNs), powered by a dedicated power source (PS) and the data access point (DAP). In this system, PS performs channel estimation and energy beam-forming that helps the SNs to achieve energy harvesting and information backscattering. Each SNs are accessed sequentially at the DAP to mitigate multi-user interference-effect. Closed-form expressions are provided to investigate the system performance through outage probability and achievable throughput. Numerical results showed that, compared to conventional WPCN systems, the proposed BC-WPCN model achieves better throughput performance with an advantage of reduced system hardware complexity.