Energy-Accumulate-Then-Act Backscatter Communications With Retransmission Under Imperfect Feedback Detection

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a threshold-triggered energy-accumulate-then-act backscatter communication system with retransmission under imperfect feedback detection. Under this system, harvested energy is accumulated across transmission blocks, and the backscatter device switches among different operation modes, including energy harvesting, initial transmission, and retransmission, according to its stored energy and decoded feedback. To characterize the resulting dynamics, the joint evolution of the packet-buffer and stored-energy states is modeled, based on which an embedded Markov chain is constructed to derive the steady-state energy distribution at the beginning of each update cycle. Subsequently, the average age of information (AAoI) is derived from the statistics of the inter-update interval and its correlation with the preceding packet system time, while the packet loss rate (PLR) caused by imperfect feedback detection is also obtained. Simulation results validate the analytical results and reveal that retransmission reduces PLR but may either improve or degrade AAoI, depending on packet-generation energy, data transmission rate, and feedback power. Moreover, lower feedback power shrinks the AAoI-favorable region of retransmission at low transmission rate, whereas the opposite trend emerges at higher rate.