Intelligent Spectrum Management and Trajectory Design for UAV-Assisted Cognitive Ambient Backscatter Networks

In this paper, we consider a novel Internet of Things (IoT) system in smart city called unmanned aerial vehicle- (UAV-) assisted cognitive backscatter network, where a UAV is employed as both a relay and a radio frequency source to help the data transmission between ground IoT backscatter devices (BDs) and a remote data center (DC). However, since the IoT applications are usually not assigned dedicated spectrum resource in smart cities, these data transmissions from BDs to the DC should share the licensed spectrum of cellular users (CUs). Therefore, we aim to maximize the minimum uplink throughput among all BDs while avoiding severe interference to CUs via joint spectrum management and UAV trajectory design. To solve the problem, we propose an iterative method utilizing block coordinated decent to partition the variables into two blocks. For the spectrum management problem, we first prove its convexity with the transmit power and time scheduling and then propose a two-step method to solve the two variables sequentially. For the UAV trajectory design problem, we resort to the fractional programming method to handle it. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly increase the average max-min rate of the BDs while guaranteeing the acceptable interference to CUs with a fast convergence speed.