Optimal time sharing in RF-powered backscatter cognitive radio networks

© 2017 IEEE. In this paper, we propose a novel network model for RF-powered cognitive radio networks and ambient backscatter communications. In the network under consideration, each secondary transmitter is able to backscatter primary signals to the gateway for data transfer or to harvest energy from the primary signals and then use that energy to transmit data to the gateway. To maximize overall network throughput of the network, we formulate an optimization problem with the aim of finding not only an optimal tradeoff between data backscattering time and energy harvesting time, but also time sharing among multiple secondary transmitters. Through the numerical results, we demonstrate that the solution of the optimization problem always achieves the best performance compared with two other baseline schemes