Backscatter Communications for Wireless Powered Sensor Networks with Collision Resolution

Abstract: Wireless powered backscatter communications is an attractive technology for next-generation low-powered sensor networks such as the Internet of Things. However, backscattering suffers from collisions due to multiple simultaneous transmissions and a dyadic backscatter channel, which greatly attenuate the received signal at the reader. This letter deals with backscatter communications in sensor networks from a large-scale point-of-view and considers various collision resolution techniques: directional antennas, ultra-narrow band transmissions and successive interference cancellation. We derive analytical expressions for the decoding probability and our results show the significant gains, which can be achieved from the aforementioned techniques.