Data Assisted Backscatter Communications Using DECT-2020 NR+ as Ambient Signal

The Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT-2020) New Radio (NR+), standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), addresses International Telecommunication Union (ITU) IMT-2020 requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT. Although DECT-2020 NR+ offers robust connectivity, it does not support ultra-low power or batteryless operation. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project's (3GPP's) Ambient Internet of Things (AIoT) initiative targets ultra-low power IoT devices operating on harvested ambient energy, with backscatter communication as a promising technology. This paper integrates backscatter-based AIoT functionality into DECT networks, leveraging existing DECT transmissions and data-assisted channel estimation to recover backscattered information. An Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) receiver is symbiotically embedded within the DECT receiver, using Received Signal Strength (RSS) of DECT data traffic. We open-sourced the Matlab code for the DECT receiver in a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) platform. Over-the-air experiments demonstrate feasibility, achieving Bit Error Rate (BER) performance as low as 0.02 under optimal conditions.