Dual-Functional Internet of Meta-Material Things: Joint Sensing and Communication Design

The Internet of Meta-material Things (Meta-IoT) has shown its potential in future IoT applications as they are battery-free and easy to maintain. Through a Meta-IoT sensor, we can obtain environmental information by detecting the frequency response from its reflected signals. Due to the reflection property, we can utilize Meta-IoT sensors to provide additional reflection paths to improve the communication performance of existing wireless systems while performing sensing tasks. In this letter, we propose the concept of dual-functional Meta-IoT sensor, which is able to sense environmental conditions and facilitate communication at the same time. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to simultaneously guarantee the quality of sensing and communication. To address these challenges, we optimize the sensor structure and the subcarrier power allocation successively. Simulation results show that the communication performance can be significantly improved with the proposed scheme while the sensing performance guaranteed.