# Joint Communication and Motion Energy Minimization in UGV Backscatter Communication

## TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint model for UGV mobility and backscatter communication to minimize total energy consumption, balancing movement and communication energy costs, with an efficient algorithm and validated numerical results.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel joint graph mobility and backscatter communication model and an algorithm for energy-efficient UGV operation, optimizing the trade-off between movement and communication energy.

## Key findings

- The proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal energy minimization.
- Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the joint model.
- The approach balances energy costs between UGV movement and communication.

## Abstract

While backscatter communication emerges as a promising solution to reduce power consumption at IoT devices, the transmission range of backscatter communication is short. To this end, this work integrates unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) into the backscatter system. With such a scheme, the UGV could facilitate the communication by approaching various IoT devices. However, moving also costs energy consumption and a fundamental question is: what is the right balance between spending energy on moving versus on communication? To answer this question, this paper proposes a joint graph mobility and backscatter communication model. With the proposed model, the total energy minimization at UGV is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Furthermore, an efficient algorithm that achieves a local optimal solution is derived, and it leads to automatic trade-off between spending energy on moving versus on communication. Numerical results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.