Fading Resilient Backscatter Communication: Low-Complexity Transmission, Detection and Synchronization Schemes

Battery-free IoT devices are becoming increasingly interesting for environmental and practical reasons, with ambient backscatter as one of the candidate technologies. We present a class of balanced transmission patterns for ambient backscatter communication (BSC) and evaluate their performance under different signal-to-interference ratios and fading conditions. These patterns allow for bit synchronization, are resilient to high interference levels and support multiple access. In addition to these advantages, these BSC patterns also lead to optimal or near-optimal detectors of low-complexity that do not need channel state information or detection threshold estimation. The evaluation results show that using this design, our backscatter system becomes more resilient to unfavorable channel characteristics than comparable systems presented in the literature. In the extension, this means a more favorable trade-off between high data rates and better coverage.