A green paradigm for Internet of Things: Ambient backscatter communications

Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted extensive interest from both academia and industries, and is recognized as an ultimate infrastructure to connect everything at anytime and anywhere. The implementation of IoT generally faces the challenges from energy constraint and implementation cost. In this paper, we will introduce a new green communication paradigm, the ambient backscatter (AmBC), that could utilize the environmental wireless signals for both powering a tiny-cost device and backscattering the information symbols. Specifically, we will present the basic principles of AmBC, analyze its features and advantages, suggest its open problems, and predict its potential applications for our future IoT.