Comparing Backscatter Communication and Energy Harvesting in Massive IoT Networks

Backscatter communication (BC) and radio-frequency energy harvesting (RF-EH) are two promising technologies for extending the battery lifetime of wireless devices. Although there have been some qualitative comparisons between these two technologies, quantitative comparisons are still lacking, especially for massive IoT networks. In this paper, we address this gap in the research literature, and perform a quantitative comparison between BC and RF-EH in massive IoT networks with multiple primary users and multiple low-power devices acting as secondary users. An essential feature of our model is that it includes the interferences caused by the secondary users to the primary users, and we show that these interferences significantly impact the system performance of massive IoT networks. For the RF-EH model, the power requirements of digital-to-analog and signal amplification are taken into account. We pose and solve a power minimization problem for BC, and we show analytically when BC is better than RF-EH. The results of the numerical simulations illustrate the significant benefits of using BC in terms of saving power and supporting massive IoT, compared to using RF-EH. The results also show that the backscatter coefficients of the BC devices must be individually tunable, in order to guarantee good performance of BC.