Energy Trading and Time Scheduling for Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Low-Power IoT Networks

In this paper, an economic model is proposed to jointly optimize profits for participants in a heterogeneous IoT wireless-powered backscatter communication network. In the network under considerations, a power beacon and IoT devices (with various communication types and energy constraints) are assumed to belong to different service providers, i.e., energy service provider (ESP) and IoT service provider (ISP), respectively. To jointly maximize the utility for both service providers in terms of energy efficiency and network throughput, a Stackelberg game model is proposed to study the strategic interaction between the ISP and ESP. In particular, the ISP first evaluates its benefits from providing IoT services to its customers and then sends its requested price together with the service time to the ESP. Based on the request from the ISP, the ESP offers an optimized transmission power that maximizes its utility while meeting energy demands of the ISP. To study the Stackelberg equilibrium, we first obtain a closed-form solution for the ESP and propose a low-complexity iterative method based on block coordinate descent (BCD) to address the non-convex optimization problem for the ISP. Through simulation results, we show that our approach can significantly improve the profits for both providers compared with those of conventional transmission methods, e.g., bistatic backscatter and harvest-then-transmit communication methods.