Block-Level Unitary Query: Incorporating Orthogonal-like Space-time Code with Query Diversity for MIMO Backscatter RFID

Because of the emerging field of Internet of Things (IoT), future backscatter RFID is required to be more reliable and data intensive. Motivated by this, orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC), which is very successful in mobile communications for its low complexity and high performance, has already been investigated for backscatter RFID. On the other hand, a recently proposed scheme called unitary query was shown to be able to considerably improve the reliability of backscatter radio by exploiting query diversity. Therefore incorporating the classical OSTBC (at the tag end) with the recently proposed unitary query (at the query end) seems to be promising. However, in this paper, we show that simple, direct employment of OSTBC together with unitary query incurs a linear decoding problem and eventually leads to a severe performance degradation. As a redesign of the recently proposed unitary query and the classical OSTBC specifically for MIMO backscatter RFID, we present a BUTQ-mOSTBC design pair idea by proposing the block-level unitary query (BUTQ) at the query end and the corresponding modified OSTBC (mOSTBC) at the tag end. The proposed BUTQ-mOSTBC can resolve the linear decoding problem, keep the simplicity and high performance properties of the classical OSTBC, and achieve the query diversity for the M × L × N MIMO backscatter RFID channel.