Link envelope correlation in the backscatter channel

© 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.High-frequency backscatter radio systems operate in the dyadic backscatter channel, a pinhole channel whose envelope probability density function and bit-error-rate performance are strongly affected by link envelope correlation – the envelope correlation between the forward and backscatter links of the dyadic backscatter channel. This paper shows that link envelope correlation is most detrimental for backscatter radio systems using co-located reader transmitter and receiver antennas and a single RF transponder antenna. It is shown that using separate reader antennas and multiple RF transponder antennas will decrease link envelope correlation effects and a near maximum bit-error-rate can be achieved with link envelope correlation less than 0.6