Performance of OSTBC in MIMO Backscatter Communications over Nakagami-m fading

Backscatter communications is regarded as a promising technology in Internet of Things (IoT) due to its ultra-low energy consumption. By incorporating with orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) which is an effective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, the transmission performance of backscatter communication can be significantly improved to satisfy the requirements of various IoT applications. Nevertheless, the MIMO backscatter channel has three operational ends, the query end, the tag end, and the receiving end, which is fundamentally different from the conventional channel. Since Nakagami-m fading can effectively model the multi-path propagation in indoor scenarios, in which backscatter communications are mostly employed, in this paper, the symbol error rate (SER) of OSTBC under unified query (UFQ) and block-level unitary query (BUTQ) approaches over Nakagami­
$m$
fading is conducted by simulation. In simulations, various antenna settings and Nakagami parameters are employed to obtain an insight for the performance of OSTBC under various query approaches in MIMO backscatter communications.