Capacity analysis of wirelessly powered backscatter communications for green IoT

Futuristic internet of things (IoT) aims to deploy billions of devices. Limited battery power is one of the major concern in deploying these devices. Moreover, it is infeasible to replace the batteries of these devices in most cases. Considering the massive deployment of IoT devices, low power sensors with wireless energy harvesting capabilities are highly desirable. In this regard, low power backscatter communications is an effective candidate. To accommodate the data traffic of these low power backscatter devices, an efficient spectrum access mechanism is required. Cognitive radio provides an effective solution to efficiently utilize the spectrum and improves the network performance in terms of throughput. This paper proposes a spectrum efficient scheduling scheme for low power backscatter sensors where spectrum is shared with the cellular network to achieve spectrum efficiency. The proposed network is evaluated via simulations, and simulation results demonstrate the improved network performance in terms of throughput and energy harvesting capabilities.