Optimal Resource Allocation Policies for Multi-User Backscatter Communication Systems

This paper considers a backscatter communication (BackCom) system including a reader and N tags, where each tag receives excitation signals transmitted by the reader and concurrently backscatters information to the reader in time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) mode. In this system, we aim to maximize the total system goodput by jointly optimizing reader transmission power, time allocation, and reflection ratio for the cases of passive and semi-passive tags. For each case, an optimization problem is formulated, which is non-convex and can be solved by being decomposed into at most N feasible sub-problems based on the priority of allocated reader transmission power. First, for the passive tags case, by solving the convex sub-problems sequentially and comparing their maximum total goodput, we derive the optimal resource allocation policy. Then, for the semi-passive tags case, we find a close-to-optimal solution, since each sub-problem can be reformulated as a biconvex problem, which is solved by a proposed block coordinate descent (BCD)-based optimization algorithm. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed resource allocation policies.