Joint Device Pairing, Reflection Coefficients, and Power Control for NOMA Backscatter Systems.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and backscatter communication are two emerging technologies for low-power communication. In this paper, we consider a NOMA backscatter system, where signals from two backscatter devices are multiplexed on a frequency resource block using NOMA in each time slot. Our objective is to maximize the average energy efficiency by optimizing backscatter device pairing, reflection coefficients of backscatter devices, and the transmit power of the reader. We formulate the average energy efficiency maximization problem subject to the minimum circuit power and the minimum data rate requirements of the backscatter devices, and the transmit power constraint of the reader. The formulated problem is nonconvex. To obtain a suboptimal solution for this problem, we use alternating optimization technique and decompose the problem into two subproblems. The subproblems are solved by using fractional programming, Dinkelbach’s algorithm, and successive convex approximation method. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm converges quickly to a suboptimal solution. Our proposed algorithm outperforms several baseline algorithms, including the genetic algorithm, fixed device pairing scheme, conventional device pairing scheme, maximum transmit power allocation scheme, and random reflection coefficient selection scheme, in terms of the average energy efficiency. The optimality gap of our proposed algorithm is investigated by comparing with the optimal scheme, in which the optimal device pairing is obtained based on exhaustive search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]