Energy-Efficient Prefix Code Based Backscatter Communication for Wirelessly Powered Networks

Backscatter communications have been widely applied in wirelessly powered networks. Energy constraint forces the nodes to only backscatter a few bits once, causing backscatter communications unable to be applied in the applications that require to deliver more data (e.g., an image). It is significant to save energy for backscatter communications so that the nodes can deliver more data with the limited energy. In this letter, the energy-efficient code based backscatter communication (CBBC) is proposed, which makes use of the energy consumption disparity between transmitting/receiving bit 0 and bit 1 in the existing backscatter communications. The energy-efficient prefix codebook is derived from the formulated energy consumption minimization problem. In the CBBC, the codebook is shared by the sender and the receiver of a backscatter link, and the sender breaks the original bit stream into equal-length blocks and delivers the energy-consuming blocks by using their corresponding codewords from which the receiver decodes the original data. The experiments show that the proposed CBBC can save energy for backscatter communication.