Double-Faced Active Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces-Assisted Symbiotic Radio Communications

With the extensive deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in next generation wireless systems, the problems of energy efficiency and battery life become exacerbated, highlighting the pressing need for innovative solutions. Symbiotic radio (SR) is considered one of the emerging technologies that aims at providing an energy-efficient solution for the ubiquitous IoT applications. In this paper, we propose an SR system that is assisted with a double-faced active intelligent reflecting surface (DFA-IRS). The proposed system consists of an active transmitter (AT), an active receiver (AR), a backscatter receiver (BR), a DFA-IRS, and an IoT device that is connected to the DFA-IRS. We formulated a BR spectral efficiency maximization problem via optimizing the active beamforming vector at the AT, the power amplification factors of the IRS active elements, and the IRS phase shift at each active element under the constraints of a maximum power budget and the AR spectral efficiency requirements. The formulated problem is non-convex due to the coupling between different variables. Hence, we divided the main problems into three sub-problems and utilized the successive convex approximation (SCA) and the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques to obtain a convex equivalent problem that can be solved using conventional optimization tools such as CVX. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm converges in few number of iterations. Moreover, the proposed scheme achieves better BR spectral efficiency when compared to the case where a single-faced active IRS or a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting IRS (STAR-IRS) counterpart is used.