Radar-enabled backscatter communication

In this work, we propose to use the echoes generated by a radar as a carrier waveform to establish and sustain a communication link between an ambient backscatter transmitter (tag) and a destination node (reader): we refer to this novel architecture as radar-enabled backscatter communication. The advantages of such an idea are clearly visible in light of reducing both the electromagnetic pollution, as a data link is activated by just re-using an existing electromagnetic energy which would be otherwise lost, and the spectrum congestion, as a form of seamless radar-communication coexistence is realized. After eliciting the macroscopic differences between the ambient signal hitting both the tag and the reader and the modulated signal backscattered by the tag towards the reader, we derive a novel signal model and propose an incoherent encoding/decoding strategy, showing that different trade-offs in terms of data/error rate are possible.