Joint Time Allocation and Beamforming Design for IRS-Aided Coexistent Cellular and Sensor Networks

Internet of things (IoT) technology is an essential enabler to realize ubiquitous connections and pervasive intelligence for the future wireless communication system. The energy self-sustainability based on the wireless power transfer technique and the coexistence with heterogeneous networks will become two predominant attributes of IoT networks. In this paper we consider the system design in a context of coexistence of a wireless powered sensor network and a cellular system, both of which share common spectrum bandwidth and are assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Specifically, the wireless sensors exploit the harvested energy from the cellular base station (BS) to transfer information to a data sink. We aim to design a cooperation scheme via jointly optimizing the time allocation of channel use, collaborative beamforming across networks and IRS phase-shifting control to improve the sensing network's throughput while guaranteeing the cellular users' quality of service. This design problem leads to a highly nonconvex and difficult mathematical optimization problem. Via utilizing the penalty-duality-decomposition (PDD) and successive convex approximation (SCA) methods, we have managed to develop an alternative optimization solution. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our algorithm and demonstrate the benefits that come from the cooperative network design.