TDMA for wireless passive backscatter networks: An information theoretic approach

The passive backscatter technology is increasingly employed in wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. In contrast to existing technologies it offers several advantages including a battery-less operation, extremely small-form factor, and low costs. Our previous works demonstrated that theoretically such backscatter-based network outperforms existing solutions. In contrast, this paper presents a new time division multiple access (TDMA) based approach that considers a practical realization of the multi-hop framework. The capacity limits for the proposed scheme are evaluated for two frameworks - (a) single hop with direct backscatter signal and (b) a multi-hop transmission. An analytical comparison shows that the multi-hop transmission improves the per-node capacity over the single-hop scenario. Numerical simulations verify the theoretical conclusions.