Multiple subcarrier passive communication is a new research area which enables a type of frequency division multiple access with wireless and batteryless sensor RF tags just by implementing RF switches to produce dedicated subcarriers. Since the mutual interference among subcarriers is unevenly distributed over the frequency band, careless allocations of subcarrier frequencies may result in degraded network performance and inefficient use of the frequency resource. In this paper, we examine four subcarrier frequency allocation schemes using MATLAB numerical simulations. The four schemes are evaluated in terms of the communication capacity and access fairness among sensor RF tags. We found that the subcarrier allocation scheme plays an important role in multiple subcarrier communication and can improves the communication capacity by 35%.

This paper proposes a novel multiple access method that enables concurrent sensor data streaming from multiple batteryless, wireless sensor tags. The access method is a pseudo-FDMA scheme based on the subcarrier backscatter communication principle, which is widely employed in passive RFID and radar systems. Concurrency is realized by assigning a dedicated subcarrier to each sensor tag and letting all sensor tags backscatter simultaneously. Because of the nature of the subcarrier, which is produced by constant rate switching of antenna impedance without any channel filter in the sensor tag, the tag-to-reader link always exhibits harmonics. Thus, it is important to reject harmonics when concurrent data streaming is required. This paper proposes a harmonics rejecting receiver to allow simultaneous multiple subcarrier usage. This paper particularly focuses on analog sensor data streaming which minimizes the functional requirements on the sensor tag and frequency bandwidth. The harmonics rejection receiver is realized by carefully handling group delay and phase delay of the subcarrier envelope and the carrier signal to accurately produce replica of the harmonics by introducing Hilbert and inverse Hilbert transformations. A numerical simulator with Simulink and a hardware implementation with USRP and LabVIEW have been developed. Simulations and experiments reveal that even if the CIR before harmonics rejection is 0dB, the proposed receiver recovers the original sensor data with over 0.98 cross-correlation.

Multiple Subcarrier Multiple Access (MSMA) enables concurrent sensor data streamings from multiple wireless and batteryless sensors using the principle of subcarrier backscatter used extensively in passive RFID. Since the interference cancellation performance of MSMA depends on the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio of each subcarrier, the choice of channel allocation scheme is essential. Since the channel allocation is a combinatorial problem, obtaining the true optimal allocation requires a vast amount of examinations which is impracticable in a system where we have tens of sensor RF tags. It is particularly true when we have variable distance and variable bandwidth sensor RF tags. This paper proposes a channel allocation scheme in the variable distance and variable bandwidth MSMA system based on a newly introduced performance index, total contamination power, to prioritize indecision cases. The performance of the proposal is evaluated with existing methods in terms of average communication capacity and system fairness using MATLAB Monte Carlo simulation to reveal its advantage. The accuracy of the simulation is also verified with the result obtained from the brute force method.