Cooperative Communication Techniques in Wireless-Powered Backscatter Communication:Preambles and Technical Perspective

User cooperation is considered as a key enabling technology in wireless-powered backscatter communication (BaKcom) to improve the energy efficiency of the overall network while comparing to a traditional non-cooperative system. In light of the literature on BaKcom, most researchers consider such scenarios, where they backscatter the information directly to the receiver. The channel fading limits the system throughput between each transmitter and receiver pair. The limitation in system throughput motivates us to provide an introductory guideline and technical perspective of cooperative communication in the backscatter scenario. While this chapter mainly focuses on the technical aspects and potential applications of cooperative BaKcom, a brief historical perspective of cooperation techniques in general for wireless communications along with their implementation details, applications and research challenges is described. Section 2 of this chapter focuses on the role and uses of low powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices in future wireless communications and shows how BaKcom technology benefits such devices. In Section 3, we start our discussion by designing a system model and explaining the basic working of cooperative communication in backscatter scenarios. Based on the available literature, some potential cooperative techniques are provided, along with their comparative analysis. Finally, Section 4 concludes the chapter by providing future research directions