Riding Over Two-Way Carrier: A Dual-Sided RIS-Enabled Symbiotic Backscatter System

In this paper, we propose a two-way backscatter communication system assisted by an active and passive dualsided reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) where the active RIS element contains an amplifier while the passive one does not. By altering the switch status within each RIS element, different transmission and reflection coefficients can be achieved, enabling a binary backscatter modulation. Moreover, a maximal-ratio-combining (MRC)-based detector is proposed to decode the backscatter signal and the end-user's signal, and the corresponding symbol error rate (SER) and throughput are subsequently analyzed. Numerical results show that by avoiding the additive thermal noise within each RIS element, passive dual-sided RISenabled communications outperform the active dual-sided RISenabled communications in terms of SER, and it is also revealed that the throughput can be significantly improved through backscatter modulation.