Backscatter communication which enables wireless-powered backscatter devices (BDs) to transmit information by reflecting incident signals, is an energy-and cost-efficient communication technology for Internetof-Things. This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted backscatter communication network (UBCN) consisting of multiple BDs and carrier emitters (CEs) on the ground as well as a UAV.A communicate-while-fly scheme is first designed, in which the BDs illuminated by their associated CEs transmit information to the flying UAV in a time-division-multiple-access manner. Considering the critical issue of the UAV's limited on-board energy and the CEs' transmission energy, we maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the UBCN by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory, the BDs' scheduling, and the CEs' transmission power, subject to the BDs' throughput constraints and harvested energy constraints, as well as other practical constraints. Furthermore, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the block coordinated decent method to solve the formulated mixed-integer non-convex problem, in each iteration of which the variables are alternatively optimized by leveraging the cutting-plane technique, the Dinkelbach's method and the successive convex approximation technique. Also, the convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm are analyzed. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed communicate-while-fly scheme The conference version [1] of this paper was presented 2 achieves significant EE gains compared with the benchmark hover-and-fly scheme. Useful insights on the optimal trajectory design and resource allocation are also obtained.
Index TermsBackscatter communication, UAV communication, energy efficiency, trajectory design, resource optimization, iterative algorithm.
I. INTRODUCTION
A. MotivationInternet-of-Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the way we live by providing ubiquitous connectivity among billions of devices [2]. Backscatter communication (BackCom) enables passive backscatter devices (BDs) to transmit information by modulating incident sinusoidal carriers or ambient radiofrequency (RF) carriers without using any power-hungry or complex RF transmitters, and thus is an energy-and cost-efficient communication technology for IoT devices that typically have limited battery energy and strict cost constraint [3]-[12]. Specifically, the bistatic BackCom (BBC) systems with spatially separated carrier emitters (CEs) and backscatter receivers (BRs) [8] were demonstrated to achieve a communication range on the order of hundreds of meters [9] [10], and has various applications such as monitoring environmental humidity and soil moisture [13].However, the current BBC systems with fixed BRs face two main challenges. First, it is costinefficient to directly deploy a BBC network for data collection in large-scale IoT. Since the communication range of BBC is shorter than that of traditional communication with active radio, many expensive BRs are needed to cover massive BDs. Second, the transmission ...