Pilot Design and Signal Detection for Symbiotic Radio over OFDM Carriers

Symbiotic radio (SR) is a promising solution to achieve high spectrum- and energy-efficiency due to its spectrum sharing and low-power consumption properties, in which the secondary system achieves data transmissions by backscattering the signal originating from the primary system. In this paper, we are interested in the pilot design and signal detection when the primary transmission adopts orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In particular, to preserve the channel orthogonality among the OFDM sub-carriers, each secondary symbol is designed to span an entire OFDM symbol. The comb-type pilot structure is employed by the primary transmission, while the preamble pilot structure is used by the secondary transmission. With the designed pilot structures, the primary signal can be detected via the conventional methods by treating the secondary signal as a part of the composite channel, i.e., the effective channel of the primary transmission. Furthermore, the secondary signal can be extracted from the estimated composite channel with the help of the detected primary signal. The bit error rate (BER) performance with both perfect and estimated CSI, the diversity orders of the primary and secondary transmissions, and the sensitivity to symbol synchronization error are analyzed. Simulation results show that the performance of the primary transmission is enhanced thanks to the backscatter link established by the secondary transmission. More importantly, even without the direct link, the primary and secondary transmissions can be supported via only the backscatter link.

Modulation Design and Optimization for RIS-Assisted Symbiotic Radios

In reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted symbiotic radio (SR), the RIS acts as a secondary transmitter by modulating its information bits over the incident primary signal and simultaneously assists the primary transmission, then a cooperative receiver is used to jointly decode the primary and secondary signals. Most existing works of SR focus on using RIS to enhance the reflecting link while ignoring the ambiguity problem for the joint detection caused by the multiplication relationship of the primary and secondary signals. Particularly, in case of a blocked direct link, joint detection will suffer from severe performance loss due to the ambiguity, when using the conventional on-off keying and binary phase shift keying modulation schemes for RIS. To address this issue, we propose a novel modulation scheme for RIS-assisted SR that divides the phase-shift matrix into two components: the symbol-invariant and symbol-varying components, which are used to assist the primary transmission and carry the secondary signal, respectively. To design these two components, we focus on the detection of the composite signal formed by the primary and secondary signals, through which a problem of minimizing the bit error rate (BER) of the composite signal is formulated to improve both the BER performance of the primary and secondary ones. By solving the problem, we derive the closed-form solution of the optimal symbol-invariant and symbol-varying components, which is related to the channel strength ratio of the direct link to the reflecting link. Moreover, theoretical BER performance is analyzed. Finally, simulation results show the superiority of the proposed modulation scheme over its conventional counterpart.