Waveform Index Modulation for Backscatter Communications in RIS-Based MIMO Radars
Abstract
This paper studies a symbiotic system in which a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assists a radar transmitter while conveying information to a reader via backscattering. The RIS is partitioned into subarrays that redirect the radar signal toward the angular sector under inspection and superimpose a slow-time modulation using orthogonal phase codes, thereby implementing MIMO radar functionalities. Communication is achieved by encoding information in the selection of an unordered subset of orthogonal codewords, without altering the RIS transmit beampattern. At the reader, the proposed index modulation scheme enables low-complexity detection without requiring channel state information. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed backscatter communication approach.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.01838,
title = {Waveform Index Modulation for Backscatter Communications in RIS-Based MIMO Radars},
author = {Mehri Nikzad and Luca Venturino and Emanuele Grossi and Xiaodong Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01838},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted to the 32nd International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT 2026), Thessaloniki, Greece