In ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) systems, passive tags connect to a reader by reflecting an ambient radio frequency (RF) signal. However, the reader may not know the channel states and RF source parameters and can experience interference. The traditional energy detector (TED) appears to be an ideal solution. However, it performs poorly under these conditions. To address this, we propose two new detectors: (1) A joint correlation-energy detector (JCED) based on the first-order correlation of the received samples and (2) An improved energy detector (IED) based on the p-th norm of the received signal vector. We compare the performance of the IED and TED under generalized noise modeled using the McLeish distribution and derive a general analytical formula for the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Based on our results, both detectors outperform TED. For example, the probability of detection with a false alarm rate of 1% for JCED and IED is 14% and 5% higher, respectively, compared to TED. These gains are even higher using the direct interference cancellation (DIC) technique, with increases of 16% and 7%, respectively. Overall, our proposed detectors offer better performance than the TED, making them useful tools for improving AmBC system performance.

翻译：在环境反向散射通信（AmBC）系统中，无源标签通过反射环境射频（RF）信号与阅读器建立连接。然而，阅读器可能未知信道状态和射频源参数，并可能受到干扰。传统能量检测器（TED）看似是理想方案，但在上述条件下性能较差。为此，我们提出两种新检测器：（1）基于接收采样一阶相关的联合相关-能量检测器（JCED）；（2）基于接收信号向量p-范数的改进能量检测器（IED）。我们利用McLeish分布建模的广义噪声，对比了IED与TED的性能，并推导出接收机工作特性（ROC）曲线下面积的通用解析公式。结果表明，两种检测器均优于TED。例如，在1%虚警率条件下，JCED和IED的检测概率相比TED分别提升14%和5%。采用直接干扰消除（DIC）技术后，增益进一步提升至16%和7%。综上，所提检测器性能优于TED，可有效提升AmBC系统性能。