Uplink Detection and BER Analysis for Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems

Ambient backscatter is a new communication technology that utilizes ambient radio frequency signals to enable battery-free devices to communicate with each other. In this paper, we study the problem of signal detection and bit error rate (BER) performance for this new communication system where the differential encoding is adopted to eliminate the necessity of channel estimation. We formulate a new transmission model, design the data detection approach, and derive the optimal/approximate closed-form detection thresholds. In addition, the performance at high signal-to-noise region (SNR) is also analyzed, where the lower and the upper bounds of BERs are found. Simulation results are then provided to corroborate our theoretical studies.