Intelligent Resource Utilization in UAV-Assisted Consumer IoT Using DFA-IRS

Emerging consumer electronics ecosystem leverage on Internet-of-Things (IoT) for real-time data flow among large number of interconnected devices. The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers enhanced mobility, automation and innovative aerial perspectives with applications in environmental monitoring, object tracking, crop monitoring and surveillance. But the UAV assisted consumer IoT suffers from the challenge of poor communication support and poor resource management. This paper presents a UAV aided consumer IoT network which utilises double faced active intelligent reflecting surface (DFA-IRS). The DFA-IRS makes use of element pairs on opposite faces to extend communication support to multiple consumer nodes. Further, an intelligent resource utilization algorithm is proposed that associates each IoT node to each DFA-IRS element using optimal phase shifts and maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). The mathematical formulations for DFA-IRS signal modelling and achievable rate are also obtained. It is observed that DFA-IRS system with per element maximum amplification gain αmaxn of 30 dB offers an improvement of 15.4% in achieved data rate over αmaxn of 20 dB. Also, the achievable rate improves by 7.8% with optimal phase shifts θopt,n. In the end, the performance of DFA-IRS assisted UAV system scenario is compared with other UAV systems aided with conventional IRSs designs.