Outage and SER Performance Analysis of RIS-Enabled AmBc Communication in IoT

This paper examines the performance of ambient backscatter (AmBc) communication systems aided by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Particularly, the study considers analysis of the scenario where direct communication paths are obstructed, and RIS is used to redirect backscattered signals to the receiver. Previous studies often assume independent RIS channel behavior or multipath Rayleigh fading, which lacks practical relevance. Recent studies suggest representing RIS channels with correlated behavior and Line-of-Sight (LoS) components. To address this gap, we propose a novel RIS-enabled AmBc communication system model that incorporates correlated Rician channels. In addition, the system model accounts for hardware imperfections (HWI) as modeled using von-Mises distribution parameters. Analytical expressions for outage probability (PO) and symbol error rate (SER) are derived to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. Monte Carlo simulations validate the theoretical framework, highlighting performance improvements in PO and SER for RIS-enabled AmBc communication systems compared to conventional setups. The study further explores diversity gains achieved by integrating multiple backscatter devices (BDs), demonstrating enhanced reliability and efficiency even under practical constraints. The results show the potential of RIS in overcoming propagation limitations in IoT deployments in next generation communication systems.