Semi-Blind Multi-Tag Ambient Backscatter Communications Using Radar Signals

Abstract

In this work, we consider a backscatter communication system wherein multiple asynchronous sources (tags) exploit the reverberation generated by a nearby radar transmitter as an ambient carrier to deliver a message to a common destination (reader) through a number of available subchannels. We propose a new encoding strategy wherein each tag transmits both pilot and data symbols on each subchannel and repeats some of the data symbols on multiple subchannels. We then exploit this signal structure to derive two semi-blind iterative algorithms for joint estimation of the data symbols and the subchannel responses that are also able to handle some missing measurements. The proposed encoding/decoding strategies are scalable with the number of tags and their payload and can achieve different tradeoffs in terms of transmission and error rates. Some numerical examples are provided to illustrate the merits of the proposed solutions.

Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

References in corpus (4)

• 6G Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey
• Non-Coherent and Backscatter Communications: Enabling Ultra-Massive Connectivity in 6G Wireless Networks
• Radar-enabled ambient backscatter communications
• Semi-blind Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Multi-cell Massive MIMO Systems on Time-Varying Channels