Advances in Backscatter Communication Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Backscatter communication (BackCom) is an emerging enabler of green Internet-of-Things (IoT) that provides a single infrastructure for jointly sensing and transmitting data with micro-watt levels of power consumption. Reducing the size, complexity, and power consumption while ensuring the self-sustainability, low maintenance, and low costs of IoT devices can enable the deployment of tens or even hundreds of billions of IoT devices for a variety of applications, such as logistics, inventory management, warehousing, manufacturing, and many others.

BackCom is an ultra-low-power paradigm that enables tags to communicate with a reader without generating their own radio frequency (RF) signal by reflecting an incident RF signal, e.g., dedicated carrier emitters, cellular base stations (BS), television (TV) towers, and Wi-Fi access points. Passive tags do not have batteries but harvest energy from the incident RF signals for their internal operation. They are thus inexpensive and have ultra-low energy requirements (a few ) because of the simple RF design.

However, passive tags suffer from limitations in both data rates and communication ranges, largely due to energy inadequacy issues. Several solutions improve the communication range, activation distance, and data rates of passive tags. These include using channel coding techniques, multi-input–multi-output (MIMO) technology, and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). Specifically, channel codes offer coding gains, which can help increase the reliability and communication range. With advanced beamforming techniques, MIMO can enhance energy harvesting efficiency and increase communication range. Additionally, distributed MIMO improves the signal quality and reduces interference. RIS can achieve reliable communication by establishing line-of-sight like channels. This Special Issue aims to address the challenges associated with BackCom systems based on recent advancements.

The topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Channel codes for BackCom systems.
• Different MIMO techniques for BackCom systems.
• Detection methods for different BackCom configurations.
• Multiple access techniques and resource allocation for BackCom systems.
• RIS-aided BackCom systems.
• Physical layer security for BackCom systems.
• Interference management/mitigation techniques for BackCom systems.
• Machine learning (ML) techniques (ML-assisted signal detection/channel coding) for BackCom systems.
• BackCom channel estimation.

Dr. Fatemeh Rezaei
Guest Editor

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• backscatter communication (BackCom) systems
• passive tags
• green Internet-of-Things (IoT)