Low-Complex Waveform, Modulation, and Coding Designs for 3GPP Ambient IoT

This paper presents a comprehensive study on low-complexity waveform, modulation and coding (WMC) designs for the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Ambient Internet of Things (A-IoT). A-IoT is a low-cost, low-power IoT system inspired by Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and aims to leverage existing cellular network infrastructure for efficient RF tag management. The paper compares the physical layer (PHY) design challenges and requirements of RFID and A-IoT, particularly focusing on backscatter communications. An overview of the standardization for PHY designs in Release 19 A-IoT is provided, along with detailed schemes of the proposed low-complex WMC designs. The performance of device-to-reader link designs is validated through simulations, demonstrating 8 dB improvements of the proposed baseband waveform with coherent receivers compared to RFID line coding-based solutions with non-coherent receivers when channel coding is adopted.