Optimized Trajectory and Passive Beamforming for STAR-RIS-Assisted UAV-Empowered O2I WPCN

This letter investigates a Simultaneously Transmitting and Reflecting Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (STAR-RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled outdoor-to-indoor (O2I) wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which the UAV avoids flying over the indoor no-fly zone (NFZ). In the downlink energy transfer (DET) stage, the energy-constrained STAR-RIS and the O2I Internet of Things (IoT) devices harvest energy from the radio frequency (RF) signals of the UAV to self-sustain its operation. In the uplink information transmission (UIT) stage, the IoT devices transmit information to the UAV using the harvested energy, assisted by the STAR-RIS. We introduce the STAR-RIS energy splitting (ES) and time switching (TS) operating protocols in the DET and UIT stages, respectively, to maximize the harvested downlink energy and the achievable uplink sum-rate. Further, an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on the penalty method and successive convex approximation (SCA) technology is proposed to solve the resulting highly-coupled non-convex optimization problems, in which the UAV trajectory based on the UAV power consumption model, resource allocation of the O2I IoT devices, and beamforming vectors of the STAR-RIS are jointly optimized. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve significant system sum-rate gains that are better than other baseline schemes.