Exploiting Multiple Antennas for Cognitive Ambient Backscatter Communication

TLDR

Cognitive ambient backscatter communication shares spectrum and RF source with legacy systems, but conventional energy detectors suffer severe error floors from co‑channel direct link interference. The paper proposes error‑floor‑free detectors that mitigate direct link interference by employing multiple receive antennas at the reader. The authors develop beamforming‑assisted energy detectors and likelihood‑ratio detectors for perfect CSI, and a statistical clustering framework that jointly learns CSI features and detects backscatter symbols. Simulations show the proposed detectors significantly outperform conventional energy detectors, and the clustering‑based methods achieve performance comparable to the perfect‑CSI counterparts.

Abstract

Cognitive ambient backscatter communication is a novel spectrum sharing paradigm, in which the backscatter system shares not only the same spectrum, but also the same radio-frequency source with the legacy system. Conventional energy detector (ED) suffers from severe error floor problem due to the existence of co-channel direct link interference (DLI) from the legacy system. In this paper, novel error-floor-free detectors are proposed to tackle the DLI using multiple receive antennas at the reader. First, beamforming-assisted ED and likelihood-ratio-based detector are proposed for backscatter symbol detection when the reader has perfect channel state information (CSI). Then a novel statistical clustering framework is proposed for joint CSI feature learning and backscatter symbol detection. Extensive simulation results have shown that the proposed methods can significantly outperform the conventional ED. In addition, the proposed clustering-based methods perform comparably as their counterparts with perfect CSI.