Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for OFDMA-based Wireless-Powered Backscatter Communications

Energy efficiency (EE) is a crucial performance metric in wireless-powered backscatter communication networks (WP-BackComNets) for achieving a good tradeoff between data rates and the overall energy consumption, which however has not been sufficiently exploited by the existing works. In this paper, an EE-based maximization resource allocation (RA) problem is studied in a downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based WP-BackComNet, where the circuit power consumption of the backscatter device, the minimum energy harvesting (EH) constraint, and the maximum transmit power constraint of the power station are considered. To deal with the non-convex problem, we firstly transform it into an equivalently subtractive form via Dinkelbach's method. Then, we apply a variable substitution approach to transform the non-convex problem into a convex one, where the closed-form solutions of the reflection coefficient, the transmit power, and the EH time are deduced by using Lagrange dual method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better EE performance than other benchmark algorithms.