First experimental evaluation of ambient backscatter communications with massive MIMO reader

Ambient backscatter communications have been introduced as low-power communications for green networking. This technology is very promising as it recycles ambient radio frequency waves, however such systems have limitations and suffer from poor performance due to their low-power. In this paper, we present and evaluate the performance of an ambient backscatter system equipped with a massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna at the reader side. A mobile device transmits a signal that is backscattered by a tag and received by the reader. Thanks to the spatial diversity of the massive MIMO antenna, the reader is able to identify, for each received signal, the state of the tag (backscattering or transparent) that corresponds to a bit of the tag message. First, we experimentally determine the channel between the device and the reader for two states of the tag. Then using a minimum mean square error algorithm we evaluate the performance of the ambient backscatter communication. We demonstrate that the performance of the ambient backscatter system is significantly improved by the massive MIMO reader.