The Optimal Control Policy for RF-Powered Backscatter Communication Networks

In this paper, we study an RF-powered communication network with ambient backscatter, where the duty cycle is adopted. In the network, the device can first stay in the sleep state for dedicated energy harvesting, and then enter the active state to backscatter data. We consider a practical scenario that the battery capacity is finite. To be specific, we study the network throughput maximization problem by studying the optimal control policy including the optimal tradeoff between the sleep and active states and the optimal reflection coefficient in the active state. We formulate an optimization problem and propose a two-stage method to obtain the optimal solution. Moreover, we obtain two significant characteristics from the optimal control policy, namely sleep or not and idle or not. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed policy.