Wirelessly Powered Backscatter Communication Networks: Modeling, Coverage and Capacity

Future Internet-of-Things (IoT) will connect billions of small computing devices embedded in the environment and support their device-to-device (D2D) communication. Powering this massive number of embedded devices is a key challenge of designing IoT since batteries increase the devices' form factors and battery recharging/replacement is difficult. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel network architecture that enables D2D communication between passive nodes by integrating wireless power transfer and backscatter communication, which is called a wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WP-BackCom) network. In the network, standalone power beacons (PBs) are deployed for wirelessly powering nodes by beaming unmodulated carrier signals to targeted nodes. Provisioned with a backscatter antenna, a node transmits data to an intended receiver by modulating and reflecting a fraction of a carrier signal. Such transmission by backscatter consumes orders-of-magnitude less power than a traditional radio. Thereby, the dense deployment of low-complexity PBs with high transmission power can power a large-scale IoT. In this paper, a WP-BackCom network is modeled as a random Poisson cluster process in the horizontal plane where PBs are Poisson distributed and active ad-hoc pairs of backscatter communication nodes with fixed separation distances form random clusters centered at PBs. The backscatter nodes can harvest energy from and backscatter carrier signals transmitted by PBs. Furthermore, the transmission power of each node depends on the distance from the associated PB. Applying stochastic geometry, the network coverage probability and transmission capacity are derived and optimized as functions of backscatter parameters, including backscatter duty cycle and reflection coefficient, as well as the PB density. The effects of the parameters on network performance are characterized.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, has been submitted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communicatio

Coexistence Designs of Radar and Communication Systems in a Multi-path Scenario

The focus of this study is on the spectrum sharing between multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications and co-located MIMO radar systems in multi-path environments. The major challenge is to suppress the mutual interference between the two systems while combining the useful multi-path components received at each system. We tackle this challenge by jointly designing the communication precoder, radar transmit waveform and receive filter. Specifically, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the radar receiver is maximized subject to constraints on the radar waveform, communication rate and transmit power. The multi-path propagation complicates the expressions of the radar SINR and communication rate, leading to a non-convex problem. To solve it, a sub-optimal algorithm based on the alternating maximization is used to optimize the precoder, radar transmit waveform and receive filter iteratively. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design

Fast Neighbor Discovery for Wireless Ad Hoc Network with Successive Interference Cancellation

Neighbor discovery (ND) is a key step in wireless ad hoc network, which directly affects the efficiency of wireless networking. Improving the speed of ND has always been the goal of ND algorithms. The classical ND algorithms lose packets due to the collision of multiple packets, which greatly affects the speed of the ND algorithms. Traditional methods detect packet collision and implement retransmission when encountering packet loss. However, they does not solve the packet collision problem and the performance improvement of ND algorithms is limited. In this paper, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technology is introduced into the ND algorithms to unpack multiple collision packets by distinguishing multiple packets in the power domain. Besides, the multi-packet reception (MPR) is further applied to reduce the probability of packet collision by distinguishing multiple received packets, thus further improving the speed of ND algorithms. Six ND algorithms, namely completely random algorithm (CRA), CRA based on SIC (CRA-SIC), CRA based on SIC and MPR (CRA-SIC-MPR), scan-based algorithm (SBA), SBA based on SIC (SBA-SIC), and SBA based on SIC and MPR (SBA-SIC-MPR), are theoretically analyzed and verified by simulation. The simulation results show that SIC and MPR reduce the ND time of SBA by 69.02% and CRA by 66.03% averagely.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figure

Iterative Signal Processing for Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), with sensing and communication sharing the same wireless resources and hardware, has the advantages of high spectrum efficiency and low hardware cost, which is regarded as one of the key technologies of the fifth generation advanced (5G-A) and sixth generation (6G) mobile communication systems. ISAC has the potential to be applied in the intelligent applications requiring both communication and high accurate sensing capabilities. The fundamental challenges of ISAC system are the ISAC signal design and ISAC signal processing. However, the existing ISAC signal has low anti-noise capability. And the existing ISAC signal processing algorithms have the disadvantages of quantization errors and high complexity, resulting in large energy consumption. In this paper, phase coding is applied in ISAC signal design to improve the anti-noise performance of ISAC signal. Then, the effect of phase coding method on improving the sensing accuracy is analyzed. In order to improve the sensing accuracy with low-complexity algorithm, the iterative ISAC signal processing methods are proposed. The proposed methods improve the sensing accuracy with low computational complexity, realizing energy efficient ISAC signal processing. Taking the scenarios of short distance and long distance sensing into account, the iterative two-dimensional (2D) fast Fourier transform (FFT) and iterative cyclic cross-correlation (CC) methods are proposed, respectively, realizing high sensing accuracy and low computational complexity. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed ISAC signal processing methods are verified by simulation results

Sensing as a Service in 6G Perceptive Networks: A Unified Framework for ISAC Resource Allocation

In the upcoming next-generation (5G-Advanced and 6G) wireless networks, sensing as a service will play a more important role than ever before. Recently, the concept of perceptive network is proposed as a paradigm shift that provides sensing and communication (S&C) services simultaneously. This type of technology is typically referred to as Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC). In this paper, we propose the concept of sensing quality of service (QoS) in terms of diverse applications. Specifically, the probability of detection, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for parameter estimation and the posterior CRB for moving target indication are employed to measure the sensing QoS for detection, localization, and tracking, respectively. Then, we establish a unified framework for ISAC resource allocation, where the fairness and the comprehensiveness optimization criteria are considered for the aforementioned sensing services. The proposed schemes can flexibly allocate the limited power and bandwidth resources according to both S&C QoSs. Finally, we study the performance trade-off between S&C services in different resource allocation schemes by numerical simulations