Ambient Backscatter Communications With Multi-Tag Selection: Outage Performance Analysis

This letter investigates the outage performance of a multi-tag ambient backscatter communication system over Nakagami-m fading channels. Considering the presence or absence of successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques at the reader, namely, SIC-enabled or SIC-disabled, respectively, we first formulate the multi-tag selection schemes where the best tag is selected to communicate with the reader. We then present the distributions of the magnitude of the end-to-end channel coefficients for SIC-enabled/SIC-disabled based tag selection schemes over Nakagami-m fading. With these findings, we evaluate the novel outage probability expressions for both schemes. We also reveal some key insights related to the system’s diversity gain. Numerical and simulation results verify the accuracy of our analytical findings, and demonstrate the impact of various system and channel parameters on the outage performance.