Design of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Enhanced Backscatter Communication

Backscatter communication (BackCom), which allows a backscatter node (BN) to communicate with the reader by modulating and reflecting the incident continuous wave from the reader, is considered a promising solution to power the future Internet-of-Things. In this paper, we consider a single BackCom system, where multiple BNs are served by a reader. We propose using the power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), i.e., multiplexing the BNs in different regions or with different backscattered power levels, to enhance the spectrum efficiency of the BackCom system. To better exploit power-domain NOMA, we propose setting the reflection coefficients for multiplexed BNs to be different. Based on this considered model, we develop the reflection coefficient selection criteria. To illustrate the enhanced system with the proposed criteria, we analyze the performance of the BackCom system in terms of the average number of bits that can be successfully decoded by the reader for the two-node pairing case and the average number of successful BNs for the general multiplexing case. Our results show that NOMA achieves the much better performance gain in the BackCom system as compared to its performance gain in the conventional system, which highlights the importance of applying NOMA to the BackCom system.