Towards 6G-Enabled Internet of Things with IRS-Empowered Backscatter-Assisted WPCNs

While 5G wireless systems offer significant enhancements to their 4G counterparts in terms of bandwidth, connectivity, latency, etc. they are unable to meet the requirements of the applications envisioned for the next decade. The demands of applications such as super-smart city, autonomous vehicles, smart health-care, etc. are much greater than what 5G systems can afford. This means that we cannot yet expect the widespread realization of IoT/IoE and have to wait for 6G to finally fulfill this long-awaited promise. As an enabler and a key player for the success of IoT/IoE, WPCN has been the center of attention in the past decade and attracted a large number of journal and conference publications. Despite the extensive efforts in this area, WPCN still lacks the required performance for being seamlessly fitted into the next generation IoT/IoE environments. The main objective of this thesis is to present ideas for improving the performance of WPCNs. Specifically, we propose to integrate other novel technologies such as backscatter communication and IRS into WPCNs for enhancing their efficiency and making better use of the available resources, without putting much extra burden in terms of deployment cost and implementation complexity on the network.