Enabling Symbol-Level mmWave Radar-Backscatter Communication

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Zeming Yang, Bingbing Wang, Wenhui Li, Fengyuan Zhu, Yuanming Shi, Yunlong Lu, Yong Zhou, Xiaohua Tian

Published: 2026, Last Modified: 23 Mar 2026IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun. 2026EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: This paper presents mmDFRBC, a symbol-level millimeter-wave (mmWave) backscatter communication system that reuses commercial mmWave FMCW radar infrastructure as the dual-function access point (AP) without hardware modification. We propose M-ary Frequency Shift Modulation (MFSM), a lightweight encoding scheme that enables the tag to modulate information using orthogonal frequency blocks over adjacent chirps, achieving symbol-level modulation with data rates exceeding kbps. To robustly extract the modulation signals from strong radar sensing clutter, we introduce a Coherent Cancellation Demodulation (CCD) method that exploits the coherence difference between sensing signals and modulated reflections. We develop a soft synchronization strategy for operating asynchronously and requiring no synchronization or downconversion circuits at the tag, supporting kbps-level data rates with low power and cost. We implement mmDFRBC using a commercial mmWave radar and verify its performance across static and mobile scenarios, achieving BERs below $10^{-3}$ over 4 meters, with strong resilience to radar clutter interference. mmDFRBC supports data rates up to 50 kbps, highlighting DFRBC’s potential to enable high-performance DFRC systems using existing infrastructure.