A Self-Sustainable Wireless Powered IRS-Based Backscatter Communication System

This paper first proposes an ambient wireless energy harvesting intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-based backscatter communication system, where an active transmission from an access point (AP) to a primary user (PU) and IRS-based backscatter communication coexist in a certain area. Specifically, the system operation consists of two phases. In the first one, the AP communicates with the PU, while the signal energy reaching the IRS can be fed into the energy harvester of IRS. In the second one, the signal from the AP is modulated into new signal for backscatter communication. By jointly optimizing the beamformers at the AP and the IRS as well as the time scheduling of two-phase process, the throughput of backscatter communication is maximized. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme achieves a substantially enhanced communication performance.