Interference Analysis of Ambient Backscatter on Existing Wireless Communication Systems

Ambient backscatter is a new technology that utilizes existing wireless signals of other communication systems to enable small devices to communicate with each other. One key problem for ambient backscatter is that if it will result in interference on existing communication systems. We investigate this problem in this paper. Specifically, we build up the theoretical system model for the ambient backscatter systems, design a maximum likelihood (ML) detector for the legacy receiver, and also derive the corresponding bit error rate (BER) expressions. Finally, we evaluate the interference of the backscattered signals on existing communication systems via simulations. It is found that channel estimation results, distances and angles between the tag, the radio frequency (RF) source and the legacy receiver will impact the BER performance.