Ambient Backscatter Communications for Future Ultra-Low-Power Machine Type Communications: Challenges, Solutions, Opportunities, and Future Research Trends

Duan, Ruifeng; Wang, Xiyu; Yi̇ği̇tler, Hüseyi̇n; Sheikh, Muhammad Usman; Jäntti, Riku; Han, Zhu

doi:10.1109/mcom.001.1900464

Cited by 54 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The reference [13] provides an overview of LPWAN, whereas Vejlgaard et al provides the coverage and capacity analysis of several LPWAN technologies in an indoor and outdoor environment using existing cellular sites [29]; however, a backscatter communication system was not considered in their analysis. The topic of BC and AmBC is catching the attention of the researchers in both industry and academia, and the number of studies and surveys related to AmBC are now available in the literature [2,22,30,31]. The concept of harvesting the energy from RF signal is also well supported in case of backscatter communication, and the research on the energy harvesting can be witnessed in references [32,33].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultra-Low-Power Wide Range Backscatter Communication Using Cellular Generated Carrier

Sheikh

Xie

Ruttik

et al. 2021

Sensors

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With the popularization of Internet-of-things (IoT) and wireless communication systems, a diverse set of applications in smart cities are emerging to improve the city-life. These applications usually require a large coverage area and minimal operation and maintenance cost. To this end, the recently emerging backscatter communication (BC) is gaining interest in both industry and academia as a new communication paradigm that provides high energy efficient communications that may even work in a battery-less mode and, thus, it is well suited for smart city applications. However, the coverage of BC in urban area deployments is not available, and the feasibility of its utilization for smart city applications is not known. In this article, we present a comprehensive coverage study of a practical cellular carrier-based BC system for indoor and outdoor scenarios in a downtown area of a Helsinki city. In particular, we evaluate the coverage outage performance of different low-power and wide area technologies, i.e., long range (LoRa) backscatter, arrow band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT), and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) based BC at different frequencies of operation. To do so, we carry out a comprehensive campaign of simulations while using a sophisticated three-dimensional (3D) ray tracing (RT) tool, ITU outdoor model, and 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) indoor hotspot model. This study also covers the energy harvesting aspects of backscatter device, and it highlights the importance of future backscatter devices with high energy harvesting efficiency. The simulation results and discussion provided in this article will be helpful in understanding the coverage aspects of practical backscatter communication system in a smart city environment.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultra-Low-Power Wide Range Backscatter Communication Using Cellular Generated Carrier

Sheikh

Xie

Ruttik

et al. 2021

Sensors

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“…The recently emerging Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) paradigm efficiently handles both limitations while traditional communication technologies fall short for massive IoT deployments [1], [2]. Since the AmBC technology requires neither power-hungry amplifiers nor a dedicated illuminator which generates a specific carrier signal for the sensors, it realizes ultra-low power wireless communication [3]. Meanwhile, significant bandwidth efficiency…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Detecting the backscatter information at the receiver, however, is limited by two properties of the AmBC system. First, the backscatter signal suffers from strong Direct Path Interference (DPI) [3]. This results from the keyhole channel property of the backscatter path which causes a substantial signal strength loss.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coherent Multiantenna Receiver for BPSK-Modulated Ambient Backscatter Tags

Wang

Yi̇ği̇tler

Duan

et al. 2022

IEEE Internet Things J.

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Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) is an emerging communication technology enabling green Internet-of-Things deployments. The widespread acceptance of this paradigm is limited by the low Signal-to-Interference-Plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) of the signal impinging on the receiver antenna due to the strong direct path interference and unknown ambient signal. The adverse impact of these two factors can be mitigated by using non-coherent multi-antenna receivers, which are known to require a higher SINR to reach the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance of coherent receivers. However, considering the unknown ambient signal, unknown location of AmBC tags, and varying channel conditions, coherent receivers for AmBC systems are rarely studied in literature. In this paper, a coherent multi-antenna receiver, which requires no prior information of the ambient signal for decoding the Binary-Phase-shift-Keying (BPSK) modulated signal, is presented. The performance of the proposed receiver is compared with an ideal coherent receiver that has perfect phase information, and also with the performance of a non-coherent receiver, which assumes distributions for ambient signal and phase offset caused by the excess length of the backscatter path. Comparative simulation results show the designed receiver can achieve the same BER performance of the ideal coherent receiver with 1-dB more SINR, which corresponds to 5-dB or more gain with respect to non-coherent reception of On-Off-Keying modulated signals. Variation in the detection performance with the tag location shows that the coverage area is in the close vicinity of the transmitter and a larger region around the receiver, which is consistent with the theoretical results.

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“…In the latter case, the backscattermodulated signal is superimposed with the direct path signal component at the receiver. In many practical AmBC deployments, the received power from the direct signal path is several orders of magnitude larger than that of the desired signal component of the AmBC system [14]. This imposes a challenge to the backscatter receiver design that needs to have a large dynamic range in order not to lose the backscatter message into the quantization noise of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) or distortion products due to receiver amplifier saturation [15], [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Particularly, the ambient signals are unknown and usually very strong compared to the backscattered signals. Hence, the useful signal is embedded into strong interference and therefore it is challenging to design a receiver to retrieve the useful signal without utilizing complex and advanced techniques [14]. The operating principle of our concept can be implemented using different building blocks, as the operation does not depend on any specific design detail of those building blocks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarization Conversion-Based Ambient Backscatter System

et al. 2020

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In Ambient Backscatter Communications (AmBC), a backscatter device communicates by modulating the ambient radio frequency (RF) signal impinging at its antenna. In many cases, the system setup is bi-static such that the receiver and the ambient signal source are separated in space. This configuration suffers from the direct path interference problem. The direct signal component can be several orders of magnitude stronger than the scattered one. This imposes a challenge for the receiver that needs to have high dynamic range in order not to lose the scattered signal component to the quantization noise. In this paper, we propose a novel AmBC system concept, in which a polarization conversion between the direct and scattered path is introduced at the backscatter device and exploited at the dual polarization based receiver antenna to mitigate the direct path interference. The proposed system is agnostic to the ambient signal source characteristics as long as it uses linearly polarized antennas. The backscatter device changes the polarization from linear to circular. The receiver antenna is a circularly polarized patch antenna with a 180°-hybrid to obtain the difference between the left-and right-hand polarized fields. Ideally, this receiver antenna and 180°-hybrid combination would completely remove linearly polarized direct path and reflected components. In this paper, we propose a robust design that can mitigate the direct path signal power more than 25 dB despite nonidealities in the antenna manufacturing. INDEX TERMS Polarization conversion, ambient backscatter communication.

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Ambient Backscatter Communications for Future Ultra-Low-Power Machine Type Communications: Challenges, Solutions, Opportunities, and Future Research Trends

Cited by 54 publications

References 15 publications

Ultra-Low-Power Wide Range Backscatter Communication Using Cellular Generated Carrier

Ultra-Low-Power Wide Range Backscatter Communication Using Cellular Generated Carrier

Coherent Multiantenna Receiver for BPSK-Modulated Ambient Backscatter Tags

Polarization Conversion-Based Ambient Backscatter System

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