In ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) systems, passive tags connect to
a reader by reflecting an ambient radio frequency (RF) signal. However, the
reader may not know the channel states and RF source parameters and can
experience interference. The traditional energy detector (TED) appears to be an
ideal solution. However, it performs poorly under these conditions. To address
this, we propose two new detectors: (1) A joint correlation-energy detector
(JCED) based on the first-order correlation of the received samples and (2) An
improved energy detector (IED) based on the p-th norm of the received signal
vector. We compare the performance of the IED and TED under generalized noise
modeled using the McLeish distribution and derive a general analytical formula
for the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Based on
our results, both detectors outperform TED. For example, the probability of
detection with a false alarm rate of 1% for JCED and IED is 14% and 5% higher,
respectively, compared to TED. These gains are even higher using the direct
interference cancellation (DIC) technique, with increases of 16% and 7%,
respectively. Overall, our proposed detectors offer better performance than the
TED, making them useful tools for improving AmBC system performance.Comment: This paper has got Major Revision by IEEE TGC