Το work with title DoA estimation with a single antenna and a few low-cost backscattering tags by Vougioukas Georgios, Bletsas Aggelos is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Bibliographic Citation
G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "DoA estimation with a single antenna and a few low-cost backscattering tags," IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 70, no. 10, pp. 6849-6860, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TCOMM.2022.3204828.
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2022.3204828
Backscatter radio utilizes the reflection that an electromagnetic wave undergoes when it impinges an unmatched-to-a-load antenna, in order to achieve ultra-low-power communication. This work exploits principles commonly found in the ultra-low-power, backscatter communication literature, offering multi-element array functionalities to a single-antenna receiver. A small number of simple, switching backscattering tags deployed in space, emulate a distributed, multi-element antenna array by copying a transmitter’s signal to distinct frequency bands. A receiver can then obtain independent observations of the same signal by discriminating said bands. Using the backscatter tag-based array, the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation problem is addressed without the cost of multiple RF front ends or hardware modifications, at either end of a wireless communication link. The feasibility of the idea was examined through both simulations and experimental deployments. An absolute error of ≈20 degrees was observed when utilizing 5 custom-built backscattering tags, while simulations showed that more than 10 tags can offer error of less than 5 degrees.