Intelligent Reconfigurable Surface enhanced Ambient Backscatter Communication enabled Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

This paper considers an Intelligent Reconfigurable Surface (IRS)-enhanced Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC)-enabled Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) system. We study the Base Station (BS) transmit power minimization problem, where the BS’s transmit beamforming vector and IRS’s reflecting coefficients are jointly optimized, subjected to the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) requirements of intra-WABN communication and throughput requirement of primary communication. To solve the non-convex problem, a near-optimal algorithm based on Semi-Definite Relaxation (SDR) and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA), and a low complexity algorithm based on IRS elements partition are proposed. Numerical results show that the two proposed algorithms considerably outperform the baseline schemes.

Keywords

• Ambient backscatter communication
• Wireless body sensor network
• Intelligent reconfigurable surface
• Beamforming design