High Order Time Shift Keying Modulation for Ambient Backscatter Communications

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) is a newly cutting-edge technology for the Internet of Things, which utilizes the ambient radio frequency signal as the carrier to transmit information. Existing works focus on the simple on-off keying modulation which has low channel utilization. However, it is not desirable to develop the high-order modulation in the power domain due to the weak strength of the backscattered signal. In this paper, we extend the high-order modulation in the time domain instead, i.e., high-order time shift keying (TSK). Since the channel coherent time is unknown at the receiver and the tag, the detection methods with training symbols will have a huge performance degradation if the channels are changed and training symbols become outdated. To overcome this challenge, we further propose the transition-aided TSK (TA-TSK) modulation and the frequency-shifting TSK (FS-TSK) modulation, which do not need to send training symbols at the tag. These two methods can work well even if the channel coherent time is as short as one time slot. Meanwhile, the detection methods for TSK are developed and the corresponding closed-form bit-error-rate (BER) expressions are obtained. Simulation results show that a high modulation order is more suitable for the M-ary phase shift keying source than the complex Gaussian source. The high order TSK can provide at least <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2~dB$ </tex-math></inline-formula> signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain at the same BER compared to the on-off keying.