Signal Detection in Ambient Backscatter Systems: Fundamentals, Methods, and Trends

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is rapidly growing in wireless technology, aiming to connect vast numbers of devices to gather and distribute vital information. Despite individual devices having low energy consumption, the cumulative demand results in significant energy usage. Consequently, the concept of ultra-low-power tags gains appeal. Such tags communicate by reflecting rather than generating the radio frequency (RF) signals by themselves. Thus, these backscatter tags can be low-cost and battery-free. The RF signals can be ambient sources such as wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi), cellular, or television (TV) signals, or the system can generate them externally. Backscatter channel characteristics are different from conventional point-to-point or cooperative relay channels. These systems are also affected by a strong interference link between the RF source and the tag besides the direct and backscattering links, making signal detection challenging. This paper provides an overview of the fundamentals, challenges, and ongoing research in signal detection for AmBC networks. It delves into various detection methods, discussing their advantages and drawbacks. The paper's emphasis on signal detection sets it apart and positions it as a valuable resource for IoT and wireless communication professionals and researchers.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Acces

Optical fibre communication over a noisy partially coherent channel

As global IP traffic grows unceasingly, optical networks demand for technology upgrades in order to keep the feared “capacity crunch” away. The most celebrated technologies of coherent detection and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), widely deployed in long-haul links, are gaining ground in access networks, which is particularly challenging due to the shared-cost requirements, leading to denser channel spacings and the use of cheaper devices that tend to be noisier. In order to make the most of this technology combination, it is crucial to have a model of the channel that accurately describes all the present sources of noise. Traditionally, the most used model has been the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, which, although only accounting for a linear contribution of complex noise and being insensitive to rotational phenomena, has shown its validity in numerous studies, as well as in commercial equipment. In this thesis, however, it is observed that the adoption of coherent detection and WDM, with lower-grade semiconductor lasers showing a moderate linewidth, yields scenarios where a phase-sensitive model becomes a must. The partially coherent AWGN (PCAWGN) channel is a popular choice that fulfils this need, but its high complexity due to non-trivial functions involved, deprives it from being suitable in high-speed digital circuits. The main goal of this thesis is to describe a reduced-complexity approximation in polar coordinates, accurate enough to find its applicability in modern systems. Furthermore, this works explores some possible end-to-end applications, like channel capacity estimation or symbol detection, assessing its performance by means of extensive simulations. Lastly, the emerging field of complex modulation of directly modulated lasers is revisited, with a special interest in how the proposed approximation can help to improve the performance of previously reported techniques, as well as proposing a new way to design spiral-shaped constellations aimed to maximise the channel capacity

Advanced DSP Techniques for High-Capacity and Energy-Efficient Optical Fiber Communications

The rapid proliferation of the Internet has been driving communication networks closer and closer to their limits, while available bandwidth is disappearing due to an ever-increasing network load. Over the past decade, optical fiber communication technology has increased per fiber data rate from 10 Tb/s to exceeding 10 Pb/s. The major explosion came after the maturity of coherent detection and advanced digital signal processing (DSP). DSP has played a critical role in accommodating channel impairments mitigation, enabling advanced modulation formats for spectral efficiency transmission and realizing flexible bandwidth. This book aims to explore novel, advanced DSP techniques to enable multi-Tb/s/channel optical transmission to address pressing bandwidth and power-efficiency demands. It provides state-of-the-art advances and future perspectives of DSP as well

Multidimensional Optimized Optical Modulation Formats

This chapter overviews the relatively large body of work (experimental and theoretical) on modulation formats for optical coherent links. It first gives basic definitions and performance metrics for modulation formats that are common in the literature. Then, the chapter discusses optimization of modulation formats in coded systems. It distinguishes between three cases, depending on the type of decoder employed, which pose quite different requirements on the choice of modulation format. The three cases are soft-decision decoding, hard-decision decoding, and iterative decoding, which loosely correspond to weak, medium, and strong coding, respectively. The chapter also discusses the realizations of the transmitter and transmission link properties and the receiver algorithms, including DSP and decoding. It further explains how to simply determine the transmitted symbol from the received 4D vector, without resorting to a full search of the Euclidean distances to all points in the whole constellation

Implementation of Carrier Phase Recovery Circuits for Optical Communication

Fiber-optic links form a vital part of our increasingly connected world, and as the number of Internet users and the network traffic increases, reducing the power dissipation of these links becomes more important. A considerable part of the total link power is dissipated in the digital signal processing (DSP) subsystems, which show a growing complexity as more advanced modulation formats are introduced. Since DSP designers can no longer take reduced power dissipation with each new CMOS process node for granted, the design of more efficient DSPalgorithms in conjunction with circuit implementation strategies focused on power efficiency is required.One part of the DSP for a coherent fiber-optic link is the carrier phase recovery (CPR) unit, which can account for a significant portion of the DSP power dissipation, especially for shorter links. A wide range of CPR algorithms is available, but reliable estimates of their power efficiency is missing, making accurate comparisons impossible. Furthermore, much of the current literature does not account for the limited precision arithmetic of the DSP.In this thesis, we develop circuit implementations based on a range of suggested CPR algorithms, focusing on power efficiency. These circuits allow us to contrast different CPR solutions based not only on power dissipation, but also on the quality of the phase estimation, including fixed-point arithmetic aspects. We also show how different parameter settings affect the power efficiency and the implementation penalty. Additionally, the thesis includes a description of our field-programmable gate-array fiber-emulation environment, which can be used to study rare phenomena in DSP implementations, or to reach very low bit-error rates. We use this environment to evaluate the cycle-slip probability of a CPR implementation