NOMA-Enabled Backscatter Communications for Green Transportation in Automotive-Industry 5.0

TLDR

Automotive‑Industry 5.0 envisions 6G‑based, energy‑efficient data sharing among onboard sensors and vehicles, leveraging key 6G techniques such as non‑orthogonal multiple access and backscatter communications to enhance spectrum efficiency. The paper introduces green transportation and proposes a multicell optimization framework to maximize energy efficiency of backscatter‑enabled NOMA vehicular networks. The authors review recent NOMA‑backscatter work, outline use cases, and formulate a non‑convex energy‑efficiency maximization problem that is solved by transforming the objective with the Dinkelbach method, decoupling into subproblems, and applying dual theory and KKT conditions to jointly optimize roadside‑unit transmit power and backscatter reflection coefficients under practical constraints. The study concludes by outlining open issues and future research directions for NOMA‑enabled backscatter communications in 6G vehicular networks.

Abstract

Automotive-Industry 5.0 will use emerging 6G communications to provide robust, computationally intelligent, and energy-efficient data sharing among various onboard sensors, vehicles, and other intelligent transportation system entities. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and backscatter communications are two key techniques of 6G communications for enhanced spectrum and energy efficiency. In this article, we provide an introduction to green transportation and also discuss the advantages of using backscatter communications and NOMA in Automotive Industry 5.0. We also briefly review the recent work in the area of NOMA empowered backscatter communications. We discuss different use cases of backscatter communications in NOMA-enabled 6G vehicular networks. We also propose a multicell optimization framework to maximize the energy efficiency of the backscatter-enabled NOMA vehicular network. In particular, we jointly optimize the transmit power of the roadside unit and the reflection coefficient of the backscatter device in each cell, where several practical constraints are also taken into account. The problem of energy efficiency is formulated as nonconvex, which is hard to solve directly. Thus, first, we adopt the Dinkelbach method to transform the objective function into a subtractive one, then we decouple the problem into two subproblems. Second, we employ dual theory and KKT conditions to obtain efficient solutions. Finally, we highlight some open issues and future research opportunities related to NOMA-enabled backscatter communications in 6G vehicular networks.