Ambient Backscatter Assisted Co-Existence in Aerial-IRS Wireless Networks

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Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) is an emerging technology that has the potential to offer spectral- and energy-efficient solutions for the next generation wireless communications networks, especially for the Internet of Things (IoT). Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are also perceived to be an integral part of the beyond 5G systems to complement the traditional relaying scheme. To this end, this paper proposes a novel system design that enables the co-existence of a backscattering secondary system with the legacy primary system. This co-existence is primarily driven by leveraging the AmBC technique in IRS-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. More specifically, an aerial-IRS mounted on a UAV is considered to be employed for cooperatively relaying the transmitted signal from a terrestrial primary source node to a user equipment on the ground. Meanwhile, capitalizing on the AmBC technology, a backscatter capable terrestrial secondary node transmits its information to a terrestrial secondary receiver by modulating and backscattering the ambient relayed radio frequency signals from the UAV-IRS. We comprehensively analyze the performance of the proposed design framework with co-existing systems by deriving the outage probability and ergodic spectral efficiency expressions. Moreover, we also investigate the asymptotic behavior of outage performance in high transmit power regimes for both primary and secondary systems. Importantly, we analyze the performance of the primary system by considering two different scenarios, i.e., optimal phase shifts design and random phase shifting at IRS. Finally, based on the analytical performance assessment, we present numerical results to provide various useful insights and also provide simulation results to corroborate the derived theoretical results.