Cooperative Communication in Hybrid User Scenario incorporating Backscattering and Energy Harvesting

Wireless energy harvesting using Radio Frequency (RF) signals and backscatter communication have proven themselves as the technologies for facilitating low power communication and providing sustained and stable power supply to millions of energy constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In this paper, we have considered a hybrid user scheme consisting of two users where one user can transmit information by harvesting energy and the other one can employ backscattering for the same. Our proposed scheme shows that these users can cooperate among themselves to achieve a higher throughput and the improved throughput gets maximized for a specific time splitting coefficient. We have formulated an optimization problem to obtain the optimal value of the splitting coefficient and proved that the resultant optimization problem is convex. Then using the numerical simulations, we have highlighted the importance of incorporating the cooperation among the users by demonstrating that the net throughput achieved by our proposed scheme is higher than some of the existing benchmarks. Finally, we have compared the performance of the various schemes under two different channel conditions, thereby, highlighting the impact of the Line of Sight (LoS) component.