Noncoherent composite hypothesis testing receivers for extended range bistatic scatter radio WSNs

Abstract

Scatter radio, i.e., communication by means of reflection, has emerged as a potential key-enabling technology for ultra low-cost, large-scale, ubiquitous sensor networking. This work studies bistatic scatter radio, where carrier emitter is dislocated from the software defined radio receiver. The ultimate goal of this work is to extend the communication range. Towards that goal, noncoherent channel coding is incorporated in bistatic scatter radio. Short block length channel codes are proposed with ultra low-complexity encoding, ideal for resource-constraint scatter radio tags. A novel composite hypothesis testing decoding rule is designed, that achieves high diversity order through interleaving. Simulation results corroborate the efficiency of the proposed noncoherent schemes over Rician fading and demonstrate that noncoherent setups offer comparable bit error rate (BER) performance with respect to coherent counterparts.