Energy Efficiency Optimization for UAV-Assisted Backscatter Communications

Future Internet of Things (IoT) has high demand for energy-saving communications, especially in remote areas and smart cities. To meet this demand, we propose novel unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted backscatter communications, where a UAV first collects data from multiple terrestrial backscattering tags via time-division multiple access and then flies into the coverage region of a terrestrial base station to upload its collected data to its associated base station. To determine the optimal UAV data collection location, we first analyze the system average outage probability and then optimize the energy efficiency with the optimal backscattering location through the Golden Section method under UAV energy constraint. Our analytical and simulation results illustrate that there is a tradeoff between the UAV data collection location and the outage probability, and the optimal UAV data collection location to achieve maximum energy efficiency needs to be closer to the tags for lower UAV transmit power.