Polarization-Based Reconfigurable Tags for Robust Ambient Backscatter Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a polarization-based reconfigurable antenna for ambient backscatter communication tags, significantly enhancing robustness against interference and outperforming non-reconfigurable tags through analysis, simulations, and experiments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel polarization-based reconfigurable antenna for ambient backscatter tags, improving interference resilience and performance over traditional designs.

Findings

Reconfigurable tags with four polarization directions outperform non-reconfigurable tags.

Performance approaches that of ideal reconfigurable tags with many polarization patterns.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed antenna design.

Abstract

Ambient backscatter communication is an emerging and promising low-energy technology for the Internet of Things. In such a system, a tag sends a binary message to a reader by backscattering a radio frequency signal generated by an ambient source. The tag can operate without battery and without generating additional radio waves. However, the tag-to-reader link suffers from the source-to-reader interference. In this paper, we propose a polarization-based reconfigurable antenna in order to improve the robustness of the tag-to-reader link against the source-to-reader direct interference. More precisely, we compare different types of tags' antennas, different tags' encoding schemes, and different detectors at the reader. By using analysis, numerical simulations, and experiments, we show that a polarization-based reconfigurable tag with four polarization directions significantly outperforms a non-reconfigurable tag, and provides almost the same performance as an ideal reconfigurable tag with a large number of reconfigurable polarization patterns.