A survey on ambient backscatter communications: Principles, systems, applications, and challenges

Abstract

Owing to the nature of ultra-low-power and extremely low deployment as well as maintenance costs, ambient backscatter technology is promising to become a prominent choice of future low-power communications systems, especially Internet of Things (IoT). Considerable studies have been reported in the emerging area of ambient backscatter communications. However, there is a lack of this kind of survey that is specific to a certain area of ambient backscatter communications and discusses some of the latest systems and the developments in the emerging area. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature related to ambient backscatter communications. We first present the basic principles of ambient backscatter communications covering architecture, basic techniques, and primer knowledge of ambient signals. After that, we provide a new taxonomy for ambient backscatter communications systems, based on the type of ambient signals. We also review different ambient backscatter communications systems proposed in the literature for each category. Then, we describe potential applications driven by ambient backscatter communications. Finally, some open issues and challenges for future research are identified and discussed.