Resource Allocation for Wireless-Powered Backscatter Communication Network Based on Nash Bargaining Solution

This paper investigates the resource allocation problem for a wireless-powered backscatter communication network where the sensors can utilize the radio frequency (RF) signals from a hybrid access point (H-AP) to transmit data and store energy. We assume that the sensors receive RF signals from the H-AP and transmit data to the sensors’ gateway by backscattering techniques. The sensors harvest energy from the RF signals, where a portion of the energy is harvested to transmit data to satisfy the gateway data demand, and the rest of the energy is stored in their batteries. In order to allocate the overall storage energy among sensors fairly, we propose a resource allocation problem based on the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) to maximize the product of the storage energy of each sensor. We prove that the energy allocation problem can be equivalent to a convex problem which can be solved by the interior-point method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a good balance between fairness and efficiency with other benchmark algorithms.