Leveraging Time-Shifted Orthogonal Codes for Concurrent Backscatter Communication

Backscatter communication has attracted significant attention due to its low power consumption and energy efficiency. Enabling concurrent backscatter allows multiple tags to operate simultaneously, and their data can be recovered from collided signals. This capability is crucial for enhancing management efficiency in smart logistics and mitigating multi-tag collisions in Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios where multiple tags work collaboratively. However, existing concurrent backscatter schemes are vulnerable to noise and asynchronous signals, causing limited performance. To address these challenges, we introduce Ortho-CodeA, a backscatter scheme that enables reliable concurrent backscatter communication despite high noise levels and asynchronous signals. The underlying concept is to take advantage of coding mechanisms to combat noise and employ time-shifted orthogonal codes to mitigate the effects of asynchronous signals. Specifically, we design a set of time-shifted orthogonal codes that maintain code orthogonality despite asynchronous signals. Built upon the designed codes, we develop a multi-tag decoding scheme to recover data from each tag. We theoretically analyze the feasibility of our scheme and validate its performance through extensive experimental simulations. The results demonstrate that Ortho-CodeA achieves a BER of about 0.0036% in the case of 7 tags with an SNR of 10 dB and a maximum time delay of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1 \,\mu \text{s}$</tex-math></inline-formula>.