Non-coherent Detection and Bit Error Rate for an Ambient Backscatter Link in Time-Selective Fading
This paper is focused on the non-coherent detection in ambient backscatter communication, which is highly appealing for systems where the trade-off between signaling overhead and the actual data transmission is very critical. Modeling the time-selective fading channel as a first-order autoregressive (AR) process, we consider two data encoding schemes at the transmitter and propose a new receiver architecture based on the direct averaging of the received signal samples for detection, which departs significantly from the energy averaging-based receivers considered in the literature. For the proposed setup, we characterize the exact asymptotic bit error rate (BER) for both single and multi antenna receivers. Our results demonstrate that while the direct interference received from the ambient power source leads to a BER floor in the single antenna receiver, the multi-antenna receiver can efficiently remove this interference by estimating the angle of arrival (AoA) of the direct link from the power source. A key intermediate result of our analysis is a new concentration result for a general sum sequence (including the asymptotic growth rates of its expectation and variance) that is central to the derivation of the conditional distributions of the signal at the receiver.
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