Coherent Detection in Bistatic Backscatter Communication Systems

Aug 17, 2025·
Joško Radić
Toni Perković
Toni Perković

Abstract

In the field of the Internet of Things (IoT), technical solutions that enable information transmission with minimal energy consumption are of particular interest. Common solutions frequently used in the field of radio frequency identification (RFID) involve utilizing electromagnetic waves to power tags and employing backscattering for communication. Detecting the received signal in a coherent manner enables increased reliability in tag reading. This paper proposes a method for coherent signal detection in a bistatic backscatter communication system (BBCS), which includes coarse carrier frequency offset (CFO) from preamble and fine phase correction from data symbols. The proposed method outperforms the detection approach based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of CFO from the preamble, particularly in scenarios with higher CFO values. The proposed detection method is well suited for implementation in software-defined radios, particularly in low-cost devices characterized by less stable oscillators. It is also shown that a preamble of six symbols is sufficient to perform a coarse CFO estimation. Since the analyzed system is equivalent to binary frequency-shift keying (FSK) modulation, the performance of FSK is presented as the theoretical upper bound in the results.

Type

Publication

Electronics, 14(16), 3262

Status

Peer-reviewed Open access
publications
Toni Perković
Authors
Toni Perković
Full Professor
I am a Full Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computing at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FESB), University of Split, Croatia, where I teach wireless network security, wireless communication networks, data science and reinforcement learning. My research spans information security, applied cryptography and the Internet of Things. Before returning to FESB in 2020, I was an assistant and then associate professor at the University Department of Forensic Sciences in Split. I co-founded the SpliTech international conference and serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Communications Software and Systems.