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Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) is becoming increasingly popular for enabling green communication amidst the continual development of the Internet-of-things paradigm. Efforts have been put into backscatter signal detection as the detection performance is limited by the low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the signal at the receiver. The low SINR can be improved by adopting a multi-antenna receiver. In this paper, the optimum multi-antenna receiver that does not impose any constraints on the types of binary modulation performed by the backscatter device and the waveform used by the ambient source system is studied. The proposed receiver owns a simple structure formed by two beamformers. Bit error rate (BER) performances of the optimum receiver are derived under constant-amplitude ambient signal and Gaussian-distributed ambient signal. Moreover, to facilitate the implementation of the optimum receiver, a simplified receiver is proposed and practical approximations to required beamformers are provided. The derived optimum receiver avoids the complex direct path interference cancellation and coherent reception, but exploits the fact that backscatter signal changes the composite channel impinging at the receiver and the directivity of receiver antenna array. Comparative simulation results show that the performance of the optimum receiver achieves the same performance as the coherent receiver even though it realizes non-coherent reception. The studied receivers provide high flexibility for implementing simple and low-cost receivers in different AmBC systems.

Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC) is an emerging communication technology that can enable green Internet-of-Things deployments. The widespread acceptance of this paradigm is limited by low Signal-to-Interference-Plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) of the signal impinging on the receiver antenna due to the strong direct path interference and unknown ambient signal. The adverse impact of these two factors can be mitigated by using non-coherent multi-antenna receivers, which is known to require higher SINR to reach Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance of coherent receivers. However, in literature, coherent receivers for AmBC systems are little-studied because of unknown ambient signal, unknown location of AmBC tags, and varying channel conditions. In this paper, a coherent multi-antenna receiver, which does not require a prior information of the ambient signal, for decoding Binary-Phase-shift-Keying (BPSK) modulated signal is presented. The performance of the proposed receiver is compared with the ideal coherent receiver that has a perfect phase information, and also with the performance of non-coherent receiver, which assumes distributions for ambient signal and phase offset caused by excess length of the backscatter path. Comparative simulation results show the designed receiver can achieve the same BER-performance of the ideal coherent receiver with 1-dB more SINR, which corresponds to 5-dB or more gain with respect to non-coherent reception of On-Off-Keying modulated signals. Variation of the detection performance with the tag location shows that the coverage area is in the close vicinity of the transmitter and a larger region around the receiver, which is consistent with the theoretical results.

In bi-static Ambient Backscatter Communications (AmBC) systems, the direct path from the ambient source to the receiver can be several orders of magnitude stronger than the scattered path modulated by the AmBC device. Because of the large power difference between these two signals, the receiver needs to operate at a large dynamic range. In this paper, we propose a novel analog-digital hybrid null-steering beamformer which allows the backscatter receiver to detect and decode the weak AmBC-modulated signal buried in the strong direct path signals and the noise without requiring the instantaneous channel state information. The analog cancellation of the strong signal components allow the receiver automatic gain control to adjust to the level of the weak AmBC signals. This hence allows common analog-to-digital converters to be used for sampling the signal. After cancelling the strong components, the ambient source signal appears as zero mean fast fading from the AmBC system point of view. We use the direct path signal component to track the phase of the unknown ambient signal. In order to avoid channel estimation, we propose AmBC to use orthogonal channelization codes., Comment: 6 pages

Received signal strength based respiration rate monitoring is emerging as an alternative non-contact technology. These systems make use of the radio measurements of short-range commodity wireless devices, which vary due to the inhalation and exhalation motion of a person. The success of respiration rate estimation using such measurements depends on the signal-to-noise ratio, which alters with properties of the person and with the measurement system. To date, no model has been presented that allows evaluation of different deployments or system configurations for successful breathing rate estimation. In this paper, a received signal strength model for respiration rate monitoring is introduced. It is shown that measurements in linear and logarithmic scale have the same functional form, and the same estimation techniques can be used in both cases. The implications of the model are validated under varying signal-to-noise ratio conditions using the performances of three estimators: batch frequency estimator, recursive Bayesian estimator, and model-based estimator. The results are in coherence with the findings, and they imply that different estimators are advantageous in different signal-to-noise ratio regimes.

In ambient re-scatter communications, devices convey information by modulating and re-scattering the radio frequency signals impinging on their antennas. In this correspondence, we consider a system consisting of a legacy modulated continuous carrier multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) link and a multi-antenna modulated re-scatter (MRS) node, where the MRS node modulates and re-scatters the signal generated by the legacy transmitter. The receiver seeks to decode both the original message and the information added by the MRS. We show that the achievable sum rate of this system exceeds that which the legacy system could achieve alone. We further consider the impact of channel estimation errors under the least squares channel estimation and study the achievable rate of the legacy and MRS systems, where a linear minimum mean square error receiver with successive interference cancellation is utilized for joint decoding., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted

Received signal strength based radio tomographic imaging is a popular device-free indoor localization method which reconstructs the spatial loss field of the environment using measurements from a dense wireless network. Existing methods solve an associated inverse problem using algebraic or compressed sensing reconstruction algorithms. We propose an alternative imaging method that reconstructs spatial field of occupancy using a back-projection based reconstruction algorithm. The introduced system has the following advantages over the other imaging based methods: i.) significantly lower computational complexity such that no floating point multiplication is required; ii.) each link's measured data is compressed to a single bit, providing improved scalability; iii.) physically significant and repeatable parameters. The proposed method is validated using measurement data. Results show that the proposed method achieves the above advantages without loss of accuracy compared to the other available methods.

Received signal strength based device-free localization has attracted considerable attention in the research society over the past years to locate and track people who are not carrying any electronic device. Typically, the person is localized using a spatial model that relates the time domain signal strength measurements to the person's position. Alternatively, one could exploit spectral properties of the received signal strength which reflects the rate at which the wireless propagation medium is being altered, an opportunity that has not been exploited in the related literature. In this paper, the power spectral density of the signal strength measurements are related to the person's position and velocity to augment the particle filter based tracking algorithm with an additional measurement. The system performance is evaluated using simulations and validated using experimental data. Compared to a system relying solely on time domain measurements, the results suggest that the robustness to parameter changes is increased while the tracking accuracy is enhanced by 50% or more when 512 particles are used.

Radio frequency sensor networks are becoming increasingly popular as an indoor localization and monitoring technology for gaining unobtrusive situational awareness of the surrounding environment. The localization effort in these networks is built upon the well-established fact that the received signal strength measurements vary due to a person's presence on the line-of-sight of a transmitter-receiver pair. To date, modeling this decrease in received signal strength and utilizing it for localization purposes have received a considerable amount of attention in the research field. However, when the person is in the close vicinity of the line-of-sight but not obstructing it, the signal reflected from the human body is also affecting the received signal strength and can be used for occupancy assessment purposes. In this paper, we first model the effect of human-induced reflections as a function of communication frequency, and then use the model as a basis for energy based occupancy detection. The derived methods are evaluated numerically and the detection probability of the proposed detector is validated with experimental data. The results suggest that when more than eight frequency channels are utilized, presence of a person can be detected using RSS measurements of a single transmit-receive pair with detection probability higher than 0.95 and false alarm probability less than 0.01 in an area of 2 m x 2.5 m. Moreover, the important implications of the studied methods on the available narrowband radio frequency sensor network applications are discussed in detail.

The indoor radio propagation channel is typically modeled as a two-state time-variant process where one of the states represents the channel when the environment is static, whereas the other state characterizes the medium when it is altered by people. In this paper, the aforementioned process is augmented with an additional state. It is shown that the changes in received signal strength are dictated by: i) electronic noise, when a person is not present in the monitored area; ii) reflection, when a person is moving in the close vicinity of the line-of-sight; iii) shadowing, when a person is obstructing the line-of-sight component of the transmitter-receiver pair. Statistical and spatial models for the three states are derived and the models are empirically validated. Based on the models, a simplistic device-free localization application is designed which aims to: first, estimate the temporal state of the channel using a hidden Markov model; second, track a person using a particle filter. The results suggest that the tracking accuracy is enhanced by at least 65% while the link's sensitivity region is increased by 100% or more with respect to empirical models presented in earlier works.

Radio signals are sensitive to changes in the environment, which for example is reflected on the received signal strength (RSS) measurements of low-cost wireless devices. This information has been used effectively in the past years e.g. in device-free localization and tracking. Recent literature has also shown that the fading information of the wireless channel can be exploited to estimate the breathing rate of a person in a non-invasive manner; a research topic we address in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, we demonstrate for the first time that the respiration rate of a person can be accurately estimated using only a single IEEE 802.15.4 compliant TX-RX pair. We exploit channel diversity, low-jitter periodic communication, and oversampling to enhance the breathing estimates, and make use of a decimation filter to decrease the computational requirements of breathing estimation. In addition, we develop a hidden Markov model (HMM) to identify the time instances when breathing estimation is not possible, i.e., during times when other motion than breathing occurs. We experimentally validate the accuracy of the system and the results suggest that the respiration rate can be estimated with a mean error of 0.03 breaths per minute, the lowest breathing rate error reported to date using IEEE 802.15.4 compliant transceivers. We also demonstrate that the breathing of two people can be monitored simultaneously, a result not reported in earlier literature.