Performance analysis of orthogonal spacetime block codes over Nakagami-q MIMO RFID backscattering channels

The authors employ the conditional moment generating function approach to analyse the performance of orthogonal space-time block codes over Nakagami-q (Hoyt) multiple-input multiple-output radio frequency identification backscattering channels. New exact and asymptotic symbol error rate expressions are derived for the case of two and four receiving antennas N = 2, 4 . The exact expressions are in the form of a sum of infinite series while the asymptotic ones are in the closed form. The diversity order that the system can achieve is found to be L, where L is the number of tag antennas, and the performance of this system is found to be more sensitive to the channel condition (the q parameter) of the forward link than that of the backscattering link. The theoretical results (exact and asymptotic) are verified through comparison with simulation results

Signal Processing for Wireless Power and Information Transfer

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies enable easy access and control of a variety forms of information and data from numerous number of smart devices, and give rise to many novel applications and research areas such as smart home, machine type communications, etc. However due to the small sizes, sophisticated environment, and large number of devices in network, it is hard to directly power the devices from grid. Hence the power connectivity remains one of the major issues that needs to be addressed for related IoT applications. Wireless power transfer (WPT) and backscatter communications are provisioned to be prominent solutions to overcome the power connectivity challenge, but they suer strong efficiency limitation which becomes the barrier to universally popularize such technologies. On the other hand, network optimization is also a research focus of such applications which significantly affects the performance of the system due to the high volume of connected devices and different features. In this thesis we propose advanced techniques to overcome the challenges on the low efficiency and network design of the wireless information and power transfer systems. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part we focus on the power transmitter design which addresses the low efficiency issue associated with backscatter communication and WPT. In Chapter 2, we consider a backscatter RFID system with the multi-antenna reader and propose a blind transmit and receive adaptive beamforming algorithm. The interrogation range and data transmission performance are both investigated under such configuration. In Chapter 3 we study wireless power transfer by the beamspace large-scale MIMO system with lens antenna arrays. We first present the WPT model for the beamspace MIMO which is derived from the spatial MIMO model. By constraining on the number of RF chains in the transmitter, we formulate two WPT optimization problems: the sum power transfer problem and the max-min power transfer problem. For both problems we consider two different transmission schemes, the multi-stream and uni-stream transmissions, and we propose different algorithms to solve both problems in both schemes respectively. In the second part we study the network optimization problems in the WPT and backscatter systems. In Chapter 4, we study the resource allocation problem for a RF-powered network, where the objective is to maximize the total data throughput of all sensors. We break the problem into two subproblems: the sensor battery energy utilization problem and the charging power allocation problem of the central node, which is an RF power transmitter that transmits RF power to the sensors. We analyze and show several key properties of both problems, and then propose computationally efficient algorithms to solve both problems optimally. In Chapter 5, we study the time scheduling problem in RF-powered backscatter communication networks, where all transmitters can operates in either backscattering mode or harvest-then-transmit (HTT) mode. The objective is to decide the operating mode of each transmitter and minimize the total transmission time of the network. We also consider both ideal and realistic transmitters based on different internal power consumption models for HTT transmitters. Under both transmitter models we show several key properties, and propose bisection based algorithms which has low computational complexity that solves the problem optimally. The results are then extended to the massive MIMO regime

From M-ary Query to Bit Query: a new strategy for efficient large-scale RFID identification

The tag collision avoidance has been viewed as one of the most important research problems in RFID communications and bit tracking technology has been widely embedded in query tree (QT) based algorithms to tackle such challenge. Existing solutions show further opportunity to greatly improve the reading performance because collision queries and empty queries are not fully explored. In this paper, a bit query (BQ) strategy based Mary query tree protocol (BQMT) is presented, which can not only eliminate idle queries but also separate collided tags into many small subsets and make full use of the collided bits. To further optimize the reading performance, a modified dual prefixes matching (MDPM) mechanism is presented to allow multiple tags to respond in the same slot and thus significantly reduce the number of queries. Theoretical analysis and simulations are supplemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed BQMT and MDPM, which outperform the existing QT-based algorithms. Also, the BQMT and MDPM can be combined to BQMDPM to improve the reading performance in system efficiency, total identification time, communication complexity and average energy cost