Integrated Sensing, Identification, and Backscatter Communication System Utilizing Inverse Scattering Approach

This article presents a novel integrated sensing, identification, and backscatter communication system that incorporates techniques based on the inverse scattering. The proposed system enables simultaneous localization, identification, and backscatter communication of tags in cluttered environments. We formulate the backscatter in terms of the tag’s structural and antenna modes and clutter scatterers. By modulating the tags with open-circuit and short-circuit states, we extract the structural and antenna mode components separately. Utilizing the structural mode component, we sense both the tag and clutter scatterers and perform tag identification using the antenna mode component. To conduct sensing and identification both inverse scattering and compressed sensing (CS) algorithms are employed. This enables not only the recovery of high-dimensional imaging information but also significantly reduces the number of transceivers required. In addition, channel state information (CSI) can be acquired by utilizing the antenna mode during the sensing and identification stage, and the backscatter communication performance is evaluated using the bit error rate (BER) based on the maximum ratio combining (MRC) technique. A proof-of-principle illustrative system is developed based on one transmit and one receive array equipped with $3 \times 3$ uniform linear arrays (ULAs) configuration. Results of sensing, identification, and backscatter communication are provided to verify that the proposed system with the inverse scattering can accurately locate and identify the tags separately or in combination, while maintaining data communications in challenging cluttered environments.