Energy Beamforming for Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Backscatter Multiuser Networks

Abstract: Wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WPBC) has been identified as a promising technology for low-power communication systems, which can reap the benefits of energy beamforming to improve energy transfer efficiency. Existing studies on energy beamforming fail to simultaneously take energy supply and information transfer in WPBC into account. This paper takes the first step to fill this gap, by considering the trade-off between the energy harvesting rate and achievable rate using estimated backscatter channel state information (BS-CSI). To ensure reliable communication and user fairness, we formulate the energy beamforming design as a max-min optimization problem by maximizing the minimum achievable rate for all tags subject to the energy constraint. We derive the closed-form expression of the energy harvesting rate, as well as the lower bound of the ergodic achievable rate. Our numerical results indicate that our scheme can significantly outperform state-of-the-art energy beamforming schemes. Additionally, the proposed scheme achieves performance comparable to that obtained via beamforming with perfect CSI.