Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for NOMA-based Backscatter Communications

Backscatter communication (BackCom) is a promising technique for achieving high spectrum efficiency and power efficiency in the future Internet of Things systems. The capacity of BackCom networks can be maximized by optimizing the backscatter time and the reflection coefficient (RC). However, system energy efficiency (EE) cannot be guaranteed usually. In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient resource allocation problem of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based BackCom. Particularly, the base station (BS) transmits signals to two cellular users based on the NOMA protocol, meanwhile, a backscatter device backscatters the signals to users using the passive radio technology. The total EE of the considered system is maximized by jointly optimizing power allocation for each NOMA user and the RC of backscatter device where the decoding order and the quality of service (QoS) of each user are guaranteed. To solve such a non-convex problem, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm to obtain the optimal solutions by using Dinkelbach's method and the quadratic transformation approach. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the system EE compared with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme and the NOMA system without backscatter devices.