Joint Optimization of Resource Allocation and Trajectory Based on User Trajectory for UAV-Assisted Backscatter Communication System

The Backscatter communication has gained widespread attention from academia and industry in recent years. In this paper, A method of resource allocation and trajectory optimization is proposed for UAV-assisted backscatter communication based on user trajectory. This paper will establish an optimization problem of jointly optimizing the UAV trajectories, UAV transmission power and BD scheduling based on the large-scale channel state signals estimated in advance of the known user trajectories, taking into account the constraints of BD data and working energy consumption, to maximize the energy efficiency of the system. The problem is a non-convex optimization problem in fractional form, and there is nonlinear coupling between optimization variables.An iterative algorithm is proposed based on Dinkelbach algorithm, block coordinate descent method and continuous convex optimization technology. First, the objective function is converted into a non-fractional programming problem based on Dinkelbach method,and then the block coordinate descent method is used to decompose the original complex problem into three independent sub-problems. Finally, the successive convex approximation method is used to solve the trajectory optimization sub-problem. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme and algorithm have obvious energy efficiency gains compared with the comparison scheme.

Performance Analysis of Three Spectrum Sensing Detection Techniques with Ambient Backscatter Communication in Cognitive Radio Networks

In wireless communications, the Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) technique is a promisingapproach, detecting user presence accurately at low power levels. At low power or a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR), there is no dedicated power for the users. Instead, they can transmit information by reflecting the ambientRadio Frequency (RF) signals in the spectrum. Therefore, it is essential to detect user presence in the spectrum forthe transmission of data without loss or without collision at a specific time. In this paper, the authors proposed anovel Spectrum Sensing (SS) detection technique in the Cognitive Radio (CR) spectrum, by developing the AmBC.Novel Matched Filter Detection with Inverse covariance (MFDI), Cyclostationary Feature Detection with Inversecovariance (CFDI) and Hybrid Filter Detection with Inverse covariance (HFDI) approaches are used with AmBCto detect the presence of users at low power levels. The performance of the three detection techniques is measuredusing the parameters of Probability of Detection (PD), Probability of False Alarms (Pfa), Probability of MissedDetection (Pmd), sensing time and throughput at low power or low SNR. The results show that there is a significantimprovement via the HFDI technique for all the parameters.

Joint optimization for secure ambient backscatter communication in NOMA-enabled IoT networks

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access(NOMA)has emerged as a novel air interface technology for massive connectivity in Sixth-Generation(6G)era.The recent integration of NOMA in Backscatter Communication(BC)has triggered significant research interest due to its applications in low-powered Internet of Things(IoT)networks.However,the link security aspect of these networks has not been well investigated.This article provides a new optimization framework for improving the physical layer security of the NOMA ambient BC system.Our system model takes into account the simultaneous operation of NOMA IoT users and the Backscatter Node(BN)in the presence of multiple EavesDroppers(EDs).The EDs in the surrounding area can overhear the communication of Base Station(BS)and BN due to the wireless broadcast transmission.Thus,the chief aim is to enhance link security by optimizing the BN reflection coefficient and BS transmit power.To gauge the performance of the proposed scheme,we also present the suboptimal NOMA and conventional orthogonal multiple access as benchmark schemes.Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the NOMA BC scheme over the pure NOMA scheme without the BC and conventional orthogonal multiple access schemes in terms of system secrecy rate.

Energy-Efficient UAV Trajectory Design for Backscatter Communication: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Recently,backscatter communication(BC)has been introduced as a green paradigm for Internet of Things(IoT).Meanwhile,unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)can serve as aerial base stations(BSs)to enhance the performance of BC system thanks to their high mobility and flexibility.In this paper,we investigate the problem of energy efficiency(EE)for an energy-limited backscatter communication(BC)network,where backscatter devices(BDs)on the ground harvest energy from the wireless signal of a flying rotary-wing quadrotor.Specifically,we first reformulate the EE optimization problem as a Markov decision process(MDP)and then propose a deep reinforcement learning(DRL)algorithm to design the UAV trajectory with the constraints of the BD scheduling,the power reflection coefficients,the transmission power,and the fairness among BDs.Simulation results show the proposed DRL algorithm achieves close-to-optimal performance and significant EE gains compared to the benchmark schemes.

Ambient Backscatter Communications over NOMA Downlink Channels

In this paper,we investigate the performance of commensal ambient backscatter communications(AmBC)that ride on a non-ortho go nal multiple access(NOMA)downlink transmission,in which a backscatter device(BD)splits part of its received signals from the base station(BS)for energy harvesting,and backscatters the remaining received signals to transmit information to a cellular user.Specifically,under the power consumption constraint at BD and the peak transmit power constraint at BS,we derive the optimal reflection coefficient at BD,the optimal total transmit power at BS,and the optimal power allocation at BS for each transmission block to maximize the ergodic capacity of the ambient backscatter transmission on the premise of preserving the outage performance of the NOMA downlink transmission.Furthermore,we consider a scenario where the BS is restricted by a maximum allowed average transmit power and the reflection coefficient at BD is fixed due to BD’s low-complexity nature.An algorithm is developed to determine the optimal total transmit power and power allocation at BS for this scenario.Also,a low-complexity algorithm is proposed for this scenario to reduce the computational complexity and the signaling overheads.Finally,the performance of the derived solutions are studied and compared via numerical simulations.

Design and Implementation of NOMA Backscatter Communication with Low-Precision Oscillators

Recent years have witnessed increasing demands for the large-scale deployment of Internetof-things(IoT)devices.Backscatter technologies are promising to meet these demands with the notable low power consumption and cost.However,the conventional designs of backscatter prioritize energy efficiency at the cost of multiple access schemes with low spectral efficiency,which hinders its large-scale deployments.In this paper,we propose a new non-orthogonal multiple access backscatter(NOMA-Backscatter)system to meet high spectral-efficiency requirement.We implement the NOMA-Backscatter system for the first time with resource-constrained low-cost and low-power hardware and eliminate the affects of unstable oscillators during the successive interference cancellation(SIC)demodulation process in real world.Results demonstrate that NOMA-Backscatter can achieve 1.38 Mbit/s throughput with 200%tag load,and the spectral efficiency is 1.73×higher than state-of-the-art backscatter systems.

Stackelberg Game for Wireless Powered and Backscattering Enabled Sensor Networks

This paper investigates a wireless powered and backscattering enabled sensor network based on the non-linear energy harvesting model, where the power beacon(PB) delivers energy signals to wireless sensors to enable their passive backscattering and active transmission to the access point(AP). We propose an efficient time scheduling scheme for network performance enhancement, based on which each sensor can always harvest energy from the PB over the entire block except its time slots allocated for passive and active information delivery. Considering the PB and wireless sensors are from two selfish service providers, we use the Stackelberg game to model the energy interaction among them. To address the non-convexity of the leader-level problem, we propose to decompose the original problem into two subproblems and solve them iteratively in an alternating manner. Specifically, the successive convex approximation, semi-definite relaxation(SDR) and variable substitution techniques are applied to find a nearoptimal solution. To evaluate the performance loss caused by the interaction between two providers, we further investigate the social welfare maximization problem. Numerical results demonstrate that compared to the benchmark schemes, the proposed scheme can achieve up to 35.4% and 38.7% utility gain for the leader and the follower, respectively.

Link Budget and Enhanced Communication Distance for Ambient Internet of Things

Backscatter communications will play an important role in connecting everything for beyond 5G(B5G)and 6G systems.One open challenge for backscatter communications is that the signals suffer a round-trip path loss so that the communication distance is short.In this paper,we first calculate the communication distance upper bounds for both uplink and downlink by measuring the tag sensitivity and reflection coefficient.It is found that the activation voltage of the envelope detection diode of the downlink tag is the main factor limiting the back-scatter communication distance.Based on this analysis,we then propose to implement a low-noise amplifier(LNA)module before the envelope detection at the tag to enhance the incident signal strength.Our experimental results on the hardware platform show that our method can increase the downlink communication range by nearly 20 m.

An Overview on Backscatter Communications

As a key low-power communication tech-nique,backscatter communications exploits the reflected or backscattered signals to transmit data,where the backscattered signals can be the reflection of ambient radio frequency(RF)signals,the RF signals from the dedicated carrier emitter or the signal photons in the non-classical quantum entangled pairs,etc.In the past 70 years,various kinds of backscatter communication systems have been developed,which will enable the low-power communications as required in the Internet of things(IoTs)and green communications.This article provides a historical view on the development and the research achievements on backscatter communications,including the fundamental principles,the applications,the challenges,and the potential research topics.This article will benefit the researchers and engineers concerning the area of backscatter communications,especially for applications in IoTs.

Smart all-time vision:The battery-free video communication for urban administration and law enforcement

The Chinese government is dedicated to enhancing the level of informatization in administrative law enforcement to ensure fairness and increase credibility.Currently,law enforcement has exposed such problems as insufficient force,difficulties in collecting evidence,and low evidential power.These problems contradict the principles of rule of law and standardization.Many local governments have implemented advanced information technologies for urban administration and law enforcement,including big data,artificial intelligence,and IoT.Among these technologies,IoT is the core communication infrastructure for innovative law enforcement platforms.However,traditional video communications rely on batteries or dedicated power sources,leading to maintenance challenges and high power consumption.In this paper,we propose AT-Eye,a new video communication paradigm for all-time law enforcement video monitoring,which is battery-free and high-throughput.The key enabler of AT-Eye is ambient backscatter technology,which enables energy harvesting and video communication simultaneously.Unlike previous methods,our proposal introduces a novel CCK-based modulation for tag cameras and achieves 4-way concurrency.The modulation is simple because it uses phase difference and it is energyefficient because generating square waves is adequate.Moreover,to ensure full compatibility with COTS WiFi,we modulate the physical service data unit.Therefore,data recovery is possible using only commercial NICs.We conduct comprehensive experiments to examine our proposal and experiment results show that AT-Eye achieves a throughput of 10.8 Mbps with COTS radios.We also simulate a 16-way battery-free tag camera system,demonstrating AT-Eye’s feasibility of high-definition video communication.

LoRa Backscatter Network Efficient Data Transmission Using RF Source Range Control

Networks based on backscatter communication provide wireless data transmission in the absence of a power source.A backscatter device receives a radio frequency(RF)source and creates a backscattered signal that delivers data;this enables new services in battery-less domains with massive Internet-of-Things(IoT)devices.Connectivity is highly energy-efficient in the context of massive IoT applications.Outdoors,long-range(LoRa)backscattering facilitates large IoT services.A backscatter network guarantees timeslot-and contention-based transmission.Timeslot-based transmission ensures data transmission,but is not scalable to different numbers of transmission devices.If contention-based transmission is used,collisions are unavoidable.To reduce collisions and increase transmission efficiency,the number of devices transmitting data must be controlled.To control device activation,the RF source range can be modulated by adjusting the RF source power during LoRa backscatter.This reduces the number of transmitting devices,and thus collisions and retransmission,thereby improving transmission efficiency.We performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our method.

Spatial Modulation-Based Ambient Backscatter: Bringing Energy Self-Sustainability to Massive Internet of Everything in 6G

Ambient backscatter communications(AmBC)is a new ultra-low-power communication paradigm,which holds great promise for enabling energy self-sustainability(ESS)to massive data-intensive Internet of Everything(IoE)devices in 6G.Recent advances improve throughput and reliability by adopting multiple-antenna techniques in conventional backscatter communications(CoBC),but they cannot be directly applied to AmBC devices for high spectral and energy efficiency due to the unknown RF source and minimalist design in backscatter tag.To fill this gap,we propose SM-backscatter,an AmBC-compatible system that greatly improves spectral efficiency while maintaining ultra-low-power consumption.Specifically,the SM-backscatter consists of two novel components:i)a multiple-antenna backscatter tag that adopts spatial modulation(SM),and ii)a joint detection algorithm that detects both backscatter and source signals.To this end,we theoretically obtain an optimal detector and propose two suboptimal detectors with low complexity.Subsequently,we derive the BERs of both the backscatter and source signals to analyze the communication performance by introducing a two-step algorithm.Our simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis and indicate that our system can significantly outperform existing solutions.

An Overview of SWIPT Circuits and Systems

From a circuit implementation perspective,this paper presents a brief overview of simultaneous wireless information and power transmission(SWIPT).By using zero-power batteryless wireless sensors,SWIPT mixes wireless power transmission with wireless communications to allow the truly practical implementation of the Internet of Things as well as many other applications.In this paper,technical backgrounds,problem formation,state-of-the-art solutions,circuit implementation examples,and system integrations of SWIPT are presented.

Routing and scheduling co-design for holistic software-defined deterministic network

As a result of the growing complexity of industrial Internet applications,traditional hardware-based network designs are encountering challenges in terms of programmability and dynamic adaptability as they struggle to meet the real-time,high-reliability transmission requirements for the vast quantities of data generated in industrial environments.This paper proposes a holistic software-defined deterministic network(HSDDN)design solution.This solution uses a centralized controller to implement a comprehensive software definition,ranging from the network layer down to the physical layer.Within the wireless access domain,we decouple the standard radio-frequency modules from baseband processing to realize a software-defined physical layer,which then allows us to adjust the data transmission cycles and tag the trigger rates to meet demand for low-power,high-concurrency transmission.Within the wired network domain,we integrate software-defined networking with time-sensitive networking and propose a coordinated design strategy to address routing and the deterministic scheduling problem.We define a set of constraints to ensure collaborative transmission of the periodic and aperiodic data flows.To guarantee load balancing across all paths and timeslots,we introduce the Jain’s fairness index as the optimization objective and then construct a nondeterministic polynomial-time(NP)-hard joint optimization problem.Furthermore,an algorithm called Tabu search for routing and scheduling with dual-stages(TSRS-DS)is proposed.Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HSDDN architecture.

Backscatter t echnologies and the future of Internet of Things:Challenges and opportunities

Energy source and circuit cost are two critical challenges for the future development of the Internet of Things(IoT).Backscatter communications offer a potential solution to conveniently obtain power and reduce cost for sensors in IoT,and researchers are paying close attention to the technology.Backscatter technology originated from the Second World War and has been widely applied in the logistics domain.Recently,both the academic and industrial worlds are proposing a series of new types of backscatter technologies for communications and IoT.In this paper,we review the history of both IoT and backscatter,describe the new types of backscatter,demonstrate their applications,and discuss the open challenges.

Large Intelligent Surface/Antennas (LISA): Making Reflective Radios Smart

Large intelligent surface/antennas(LISA),a two-dimensional artificial structure with a large number of reflective-surface/antenna elements,is a promising reflective radio technology to construct programmable wireless environments in a smart way.Specifically,each element of the LISA adjusts the reflection of the incident electromagnetic waves with unnatural properties,such as negative refraction,perfect absorption,and anomalous reflection,thus the wireless environments can be software-defined according to various design objectives.In this paper,we introduce the reflective radio basics,including backscattering principles,backscatter communication,reflective relay,the fundamentals and implementations of LISA technology.Then,we present an overview of the state-of-the-art research on emerging applications of LISA-aided wireless networks.Finally,the limitations,challenges,and open issues associated with LISA for future wireless applications are discussed.