Direct and Ambient Backscatter Communications with a Dual-Function Radar Transmitter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-function radar system that enables simultaneous direct communication and ambient backscatter communication, utilizing structured waveforms and decoding schemes to improve efficiency and reliability.

Contribution

It develops two novel signaling schemes leveraging radar waveform structure for joint and disjoint decoding in ambient backscatter communication systems.

Findings

Both schemes enable reliable message decoding under certain codebook conditions.

Performance analysis shows tradeoffs between error probabilities and channel estimation accuracy.

The pilot-aided scheme allows for non-iterative and iterative decoding methods.

Abstract

This work considers a system where a dual-function radar transmitter (source) performs direct communication with a reader while simultaneously enabling ambient backscatter communication from a tag. The source embeds its message into a coded pulse repeatedly transmitted over a frame, whereas the tag exploits the resulting environmental reverberation (clutter) as an ambient carrier to convey its own message. By leveraging the structure induced by the radar waveforms, we develop two signaling schemes. In the pilot-free scheme, the source and tag messages are conveyed through nonlinear vector modulation; the induced subspace structure enables both joint decoding, where all unknown quantities are simultaneously estimated, and disjoint decoding, where the tag codeword is recovered first, followed by the estimation of the source codeword and the channel vectors. In the pilot-aided scheme, pilot symbols and linearly modulated data symbols are embedded within each frame, enabling both non-iterative decoding based on pilot-derived channel estimates and iterative decoding via alternating channel estimation and data detection. We establish sufficient conditions on the source and tag codebooks that guarantee noiseless identifiability of the involved messages and channels. Finally, performance is evaluated in terms of source/tag error probabilities and channel-estimation accuracy, and the resulting system-level tradeoffs are discussed.