This article investigates the effectiveness of applying backscatter communication (BC) technique into a system that utilizes mobile edge computing (MEC) aided by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and enabling non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The system is specifically designed to leverage BC’s energy-efficient data transmission and MEC’s proximate computation resources, aiming to address the power and computation constraints of IoT device (ID) clusters in dense urban scenarios. Additionally, a crucial system effectiveness criterion is its ability to enable sustainable operation for resource-constrained devices. Therefore, to assess the energy sustainability of the system, the derivation of a closed-form formulation termed energy outage probability (EOP) is leveraged under Nakagami- \(m\) fading channels. Eventually, extensive numerical simulations, considering a wide range of critical parameters, have robustly validated the precision and viability of the system model.