Integrated Sensing and Communication for Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems

This paper investigates integrated sensing and communication for an ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) system. The backscatter devices (BDs) modulate information over ambient orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals, and the receiver (RX) realizes joint localization and information detection of the BDs. The system model is first established and the link-layer protocol is designed. Then the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) based and compressed sensing (CS) based methods are proposed to estimate the locations of BDs. The attenuation coefficients of the paths backscattered by BDs are estimated through least square (LS) method, and finally the information transmitted by the BDs is decoded. Simulation results have verified the performance of the algorithms, and it is shown that the larger bandwidth and antenna aperture are beneficial to improving the localization accuracy.