A Better Than Alamouti OSTBC for MIMO Backscatter Communications

Backscatter communications have received increasingly attention in Internet of Things (IoT) due to its advantages of requiring no internal battery and almost zero maintenance. However, the drawback of backscatter communications is that, its channel fades deeper than conventional channel. To improve the performance, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been investigated for backscatter communications. By considering duty cycle, a particular behavior of backscatter communications, as a new performance criterion, we propose a $2 \times 2$ orthogonal space-time block code for MIMO backscatter communications. The new code is a rotation of the classical Alamouti code, and in MIMO backscatter channels, this simple rotation will incur an improved duty cycle for both linear and nonlinear energy harvester models, as well as a same, or even better symbol error rate performance. We provide both rigorous mathematical proofs and numerical simulations to show the above results. An interesting thing is that, this new code does not outperform Alamouti code in conventional MIMO channels, which indicates that the space-time code design criteria for conventional channels is not the optimal one for backscatter channels, and existing space-time codes should be reconsidered and/or redesigned to achieve a higher performance in MIMO backscatter communications.

I. Introduction

Backscatter communications have attracted an increasing attention of the academia and the industry due to its low cost and energy consumption, and they are widely employed in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, e.g., smart wearable device [1], biomedical field [2] and medical health [3]. In backscatter communications, the tag does not require internal energy sources [4], [5], instead, the tag harvests energy from the environment or the signals generated by the reader to drive its integrated circuit.