Wireless-powered backscatter communications for smart sustainable cities: A secrecy analysis

Due to its ability to enable self-sustainable communications, wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WP-BackCom) has been deemed a promising technology for supporting smart sustainable cities. We note that the existing works on analyzing the secrecy performance of WP-BackComs have largely ignored the spatial randomness of nodes that is used to model a large-scale network. To fill this gap, this paper evaluates the secrecy outage probability of the large-scale WP-BackComs based on a tractable framework of stochastic geometry (SG). In particular, the imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) at each gateway (GW) and eavesdropper (Eve), and the non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model and energy-causality constraint at each backscatter user (BU) are considered. The energy outage probability and secrecy outage probability expressions are derived in the general case at first, then the closed-form expressions are obtained under the special scenario, i.e., the no-noise and the typical propagation loss scenario. Numerical simulations validate the analytical results and examine the impacts of various parameters on the secrecy performance. In particular, there exists an optimal reflection coefficient for secrecy outage probability minimization under certain conditions, and the optimal reflection coefficient increases with the increasing SIC coefficient at GW.