Joint Data and Channel Estimation in Radar-enabled Backscatter Communications

In this work, we consider a radar-enabled ambient backscatter communication, where the reverberation generated by a radar system is used as an ambient carrier to deliver information to a destination. Different from a previous study, that focuses on noncoherent encoding/decoding strategies, which require an exhaustive search on a set whose cardinality scales exponentially with the data size, we consider here a pilot-based solution and propose a simplified decoding scheme relying on constrained regularized least squares and search relaxation, whose complexity per iteration scales only linearly with the data size. A numerical example is provided to show merits and drawbacks of the proposed scheme with respect to different benchmarks.