Optimal Resource Allocation in Full-Duplex Ambient Backscatter Communication Networks for Green IoT

Abstract: Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) enables wireless-powered backscatter devices (BDs) to transmit information over ambient radio-frequency (RF) carriers without using an RF transmitter, and thus has emerged as a promising technology for green Internet-of-Things. This paper considers an AmBC network in which a full-duplex access point (FAP) simultaneously transmits downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals to its legacy user (LU) and receives uplink signals backscattered from multiple BDs in a time-division-multiple-access manner. To enhance the system performance from multiple design dimensions and ensure fairness, we maximize the minimum throughput among all BDs by jointly optimizing the BDs' backscatter time portions, the BDs' power reflection coefficients, and the FAP's subcarrier power allocation, subject to the LU's throughput constraint, the BDs' harvested-energy constraints, and other practical constraints. As such, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for solving the formulated non-convex problem by leveraging the block coordinated decent and successive convex optimization techniques. We further show the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and analyze its complexity. Finally, extensive simulation results show that the proposed joint design achieves significant throughput gains as compared to the benchmark scheme with equal resource allocation.