On the Effect of Correlation on the Capacity of Backscatter Communication Systems

Abstract: We analyse the effect of correlation between the forward and backward links on the capacity of backscatter communication systems. To that aim, we obtain an analytical expression for the average capacity under a correlated Rayleigh product fading channel, as well as closed-form asymptotic expressions for the high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. Our results show that correlation is indeed detrimental for a fixed target SNR; contrarily to the common belief, we also see that correlation can be actually beneficial in some instances when a fixed power budget is considered.