Accurate Phase Angle Measurement of Backscatter Signal under Noisy Environment

Backscatter communication is an emerging wireless access technology to realize ultra-low power terminals exploiting the modulated reflection of incident radio wave. This paper proposes a method to measure the phase angle of backscatter link using principal component analysis (PCA). The phase angle measurement of backscatter link at the receiver is essential to maximize the signal quality for subsequent demodulation and to measure the distance and the angle of arrival. The drawback of popular phase angle measurement with naive phase averaging and linear regression analysis is to produce erroneous phase angle, where the phase angle is close to $\pm\frac{\pi}{2}$ radian and the signal quality is poor. The advantage of the proposal is quantified with a computer simulation, a conducted experiment and radio propagation experiments.