Resource Allocation Optimization for Secure Multidevice Wirelessly Powered Backscatter Communication With Artificial Noise

Wirelessly powered backscatter communications (WPBC) is an emerging technology for providing continuous energy and ultra-low power communications. Despite some progress in WPBC systems, resource allocation for multiple devices towards secure backscatter communications (BC) and efficient-energy harvesting (EH) requests a deep-insight investigation. In this paper, we consider a WPBC system in which a full-duplex access point (AP) transmits multi-sinewave signals to power backscatter devices (BDs) and injects artificial noise (AN) to secure their backscatter transmissions. To maximize the minimum harvested energy and ensure fairness and security of all BDs, we formulate an optimization problem by jointly considering the backscatter time, power splitting ratio between multi-sinewave and AN, and signal power allocation. For a single-BD system, we characterize the achievable secrecy rate-energy region with a non-linear energy harvester and propose two algorithms to solve an energy maximization problem. We then analyze the effect of multi-sinewave and AN signals on BD’s secrecy rate and harvested energy through simulations and proof-of-concept experiments. For a multi-BD system, we propose an iterative algorithm by leveraging block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) techniques to solve the non-convex problem of fair resource allocation and show its convergence and complexity. Numerical results show the proposed algorithm achieves optimal and equitable harvested energy for all BDs with satisfying the security constraint.