In the fifth generation era, the pervasive applications of Internet of Things and massive machine-type communications have initiated increasing research interests on the backscatter wireless powered communication (B-WPC) technique due to its ultra high energy efficiency and low cost. The ubiquitous B-WPC network is characterized by nodes with dynamic spatial positions and sporadic short packets, of which the performance has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we give a comprehensive analysis of a multi-antenna B-WPC network with sporadic short packets under a stochastic geometry framework. By exploiting a time-space Poisson point process model, the behavior of the network is well captured in a decentralized and asynchronous transmission way. We then analyze the energy and information outage performance in the energy harvest and backscatter modulation phases of the backscatter network, respectively. The optimal transmission slot length and division are obtained by maximizing the network-wide spatial throughput. Moreover, we find an interesting result that there exists the optimal tradeoff between the durations of the energy harvest and backscatter modulation phases for spatial throughput maximization. Numerical results are demonstrated to verify our analytical findings and show that this tradeoff region gets shrunk when the outage constraints become more stringent.Index Terms-Backscatter wireless powered communications, Internet of Things (IoT), radio frequency identification (RFID), energy harvest, stochastic geometry. arXiv:1801.09383v1 [cs.IT] 29 Jan 2018 in [14]-[16] under the framework of physical layer security. Recently, the ambient backscatter technology, which utilizes RF signals from the environment rather than the RF signals transmitted by the RFID reader, is studied in [17], [18].Since the passive tag has no on-tag power source but relies on energy harvesting, the second research direction lies in considering energy transfer in the point-to-point backscatter system, which is also called the backscatter wireless powered communication (B-WPC) system [19]. In [20], a measurement-based proof of the B-WPC concept is presented, and it is shown that the wireless energy transfer (WET) can be optimized by relying on only the power levels received by the base station. The authors in [21] study RF-enabled WET via energy beamforming in a backscatter system with multiple RFID tags, and a customized method is proposed to resolve the associated channel estimation problem. However, the research on B-WPC is still sparse.Different from the above research on point-to-point backscatter communication systems, the third research trend arises from the increasing deployments of B-WPC networks.As it is pointed out in [22], handheld and mobile RFID readers become more and more prevailing due to their portability and flexibility in the evolution of the IoT in the fifth generation (5G) era. Therefore, it is of great importance to further study the backscatter system design and B-WPC from the perspective of large-scale ra...