Joint Uplink and Downlink Resource Allocation for the Internet of Things

High-efficiency utilization of resources has always been the major concern and design objective in the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based wireless system model for IoT is proposed, where the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer and the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are jointly used to improve the energy and spectrum utilization. Specifically, terminals can decode information and harvest energy simultaneously in the downlink and transmit signals to the access point (AP) in the uplink. Then, the AP decodes terminals’ information based on NOMA. A joint uplink and downlink resource allocation scheme is proposed with the optimization objective to maximize the sum information decoding rate in the uplink under the condition that the target sum information decoding rate in the downlink is guaranteed. To solve the optimization problem, a two-step algorithm is proposed. For the first step, a joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm is designed to maximize the harvested energy of terminals in the downlink. For the second step, a subslot optimization algorithm is designed to increase the sum information decoding rate in the uplink. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the conventional algorithms, the proposed algorithm can not only achieve the maximization of harvested energy but also support higher sum information decoding rate in the uplink.