Do Ambient Backscatter Communication Receivers Require Low-Noise Amplifiers?
This addresses a specific challenge in ambient backscatter communication for improving reliability, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work on LNAs in conventional communication.
The paper tackles the problem of whether low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) improve symbol detection in ambient backscatter communication by analyzing bit error rate and deflection coefficient, finding that LNAs enhance performance at low-to-moderate ambient source power.
In ambient backscatter communication (AmBC), strong direct interference from the ambient source poses a major challenge to reliable symbol detection. Although previous studies have shown that employing a low-noise amplifier (LNA) in conventional point-to-point communication improves symbol detection performance at low-to-moderate transmission power, it remains unclear whether this improvement also holds for AmBC. To respond it, in this work, we investigate the symbol detection performance of an AmBC receiver that is equipped with an LNA and adopts the energy detection (ED) to recover tag's information. Particularly, we first propose a new AmBC symbol detection framework that incorporates LNA parameters. On this basis, we derive the bit error rate (BER) of the ED and employ the deflection coefficient (DC) to demonstrate that the detection performance can be enhanced by the LNA at low-to-moderate ambient source transmission power. Then, we derive the near-optimal detection threshold to minimize the BER and propose a method to estimate the required parameters for this threshold by leveraging the tag's pilot symbols.