Resource Allocation in NOMA-Enhanced Full-Duplex Symbiotic Radio Networks

This paper studies a full-duplex symbiotic radio network, where a full-duplex access point (FAP) transmits downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signals to a legacy user (LU) and simultaneously receives signals backscattered from multiple passive backscatter devices (BDs) with capability of radio-frequency energy harvesting. A non-orthogonal-multiple-access enhanced dynamic-time-division-multiple-access (NOMA-DTDMA) transmission scheme is proposed to exploit the channel dynamics and further improve the spectrum efficiency. In order to maximize the throughput performance and ensure BD fairness, we maximize the minimum throughput among all BDs by jointly optimizing the FAP's subcarrier power allocation, the BDs' backscatter time allocation and power reflection coefficients, subject to the LU's throughput requirement, the BDs' harvested energy requirements, and other practical constraints. An efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated non-convex problem, by utilizing the block coordinated descent and successive convex optimization techniques. The convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm are also analyzed. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-DTDMA scheme significantly outperforms the benchmark scheme of dynamic TDMA in terms of both throughput performance and BD fairness. Also, the trade-off performances between the BDs' throughput and the LU's throughput requirement as well as the BDs' harvested energy requirements are numerically verified.