Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for 6G Backscatter-Enabled NOMA IoV Networks

The integration of Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is expected to support connectivity of low-powered Internet-of-Vehicles (IoVs) in the upcoming Sixth-Generation (6G) transportation systems. This paper proposes an energy-efficient resource allocation framework for the AmBC-enabled NOMA IoV network under imperfect Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) decoding. In particular, multiple Road-Side Units (RSUs) transmit superimposed signals to their associated IoVs utilizing downlink NOMA transmission. Meanwhile, the Backscatter Tags (BackTags) also transmit data symbols towards nearby IoVs by reflecting the superimposed signals of RSUs. Thus, the objective is to maximize the total energy efficiency of the NOMA IoV network subject to the minimum data rate of all IoVs. A joint problem that simultaneously optimizes the total power budget of each RSU, power allocation coefficient of IoVs and reflection power of BackTags under imperfect SIC decoding is formulated. A Dinkelbach approach is first adopted to transform the optimization problem and then the transformed problem is decoupled into two subproblems for optimal transmit power at RSUs and efficient reflection power at BackTags, respectively. To solve the problems efficiently, dual theory and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are exploited, where the Lagrangian dual variables are iteratively calculated using the subgradient method. To check the performance of the proposed framework, a benchmark optimization without AmBC is also provided. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AmBC-enabled NOMA IoV framework over the benchmark conventional IoV framework.