Short-Range Ambient Backscatter Communication Using Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has been introduced to address communication and power efficiency issues for short-range and low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. On the other hand, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been recently proposed as a promising approach that can control the propagation environment especially in indoor communication environments. In this paper, we propose a new AmBC model over ambient orthogonal-frequency-divisionmultiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers in the frequency domain in conjunction with RIS for short-range communication scenarios. A tag transmits one bit per each OFDM subcarrier broadcasted from a WiFi access point. Then, RIS augments the signal quality at a reader by compensating the phase distortion effect of multipath channel on the incident signal. We also exploit the special spectrum structure of OFDM to transmit more data over its squeezed orthogonal subcarriers in the frequency domain. Consequently, the proposed method improves the bit-error-rate (BER) performance and provides a higher data rate compared to existing AmBC methods. Analytical and numerical evaluations show the superior performance of the proposed approach in terms of BER and data rate.

Performance of Ambient Backscatter Systems Using Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

“…3. Comparing (5) with (15), the only difference is that h ′ st in the numerator is replaced by the sum…”

“…It uses a reflective surface that is able to adjust the phase continuously [11] or discretely [12], [13], as well as use amplitude control [14] to compensate the channel fading for diversity gain, and has been adopted in different communications systems for performance improvement, including ambient backscatter communications. In [15], an ambient backscatter communications system using RIS in all links was studied to show improvement over systems without RIS. In [16], RIS was deployed in a bi-static backscatter communications system and beamforming was performed to minimize transmission power.…”

Toward Joint Radar, Communication, Computation, Localization, and Sensing in IoT

“…8. Ambient BackCom [56] which uses ambient signals takes one step further for spectrum efficiency as it uses the same spectrum as ambient RF signals for short-range communication purposes. For instance, in a large-scale overview, [57] proposed a JSAC model for the willingness to sense a large number of the RFID tags, e.g., attached to the attendees in a stadium, without guaranteed successful communication for each tag.…”

Outage probability computation in multi-backscatter systems with multi-modes of operation

“…Therefore, integrating NOMA with AmBC networks shows great promise for future ❒ ISSN: 2302-9285 green IoT networks. Apart from NOMA, there have been several recent studies on deploying reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to improve backscatter communication performance [19]- [21]. However, in this article, we focus on the contribution of NOMA to AmBCs performance.…”