Backscatter-assisted Relaying in Wireless Powered Communications Network

This paper studies a novel cooperation method in a two-user wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which one hybrid access point (HAP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed wireless devices (WDs), while the WDs use the harvested energy to transmit their independent information to the HAP. To tackle the user unfairness problem caused by the near-far effect in WPCN, we allow the WD with the stronger WD-to-HAP channel to use part of its harvested energy to help relay the other weaker user's information to the HAP. In particular, we exploit the use of backscatter communication during the wireless energy transfer phase such that the helping relay user can harvest energy and receive the information from the weaker user simultaneously. We derive the maximum common throughput performance by jointly optimizing the time duration and power allocations on wireless energy and information transmissions. Our simulation results demonstrate that the backscatter-assisted cooperation scheme can effectively improve the throughput fairness performance in WPCNs.