Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems: Detection and Performance Analysis

TLDR

Ambient backscatter uses ambient RF signals to enable battery‑free device communication and has recently attracted significant attention. The paper studies signal detection in ambient backscatter systems using differential encoding to avoid channel estimation. The authors formulate a new transmission model, design a data‑detection algorithm, and derive two closed‑form thresholds—one minimizing sum BER and another balancing 0/1 error probabilities—along with corresponding BER expressions and high‑SNR bounds. Simulations confirm the theoretical analysis.

Abstract

Ambient backscatter technology that utilizes the ambient radio frequency signals to enable the communications of battery-free devices has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we study the problem of signal detection for an ambient backscatter communication system that adopts the differential encoding to eliminate the necessity of channel estimation. Specifically, we formulate a new transmission model, design the data detection algorithm, and derive two closed-form detection thresholds. One threshold is used to approximately achieve the minimum sum bit error rate (BER), while the other yields balanced error probabilities for "0" bit and "1" bit. The corresponding BER expressions are derived to fully characterize the detection performance. In addition, the lower and the upper bounds of BER at high signal-to-noise ratio regions are also examined to simplify a performance analysis. Simulation results are then provided to corroborate the theoretical studies.