Due to the extremely low power consumption, ambient backscatter communications has attracted great interest from both industry and research communities. However, the short communication range and unpleasant reliability are the two major challenges which prevent ambient backscatter from wide deployment in WSNs. In this work, we propose the design of a robust cooperative routing protocol (RCRP) for ambient backscatter based wireless sensor network (AmB-WSN), to account for the volatility of ambient RF environment. In RCRP, the backscatter sensor nodes (BSNs) work cooperatively to reduce the probability of routing path failure. To ensure robustness, we propose novel routing metrics to construct a robust counterpart for each nominal routing path, which are related to the strength of ambient RF signals and the BSNs' residual energy. Extensive simulations reveal that RCRP can achieve enhanced routing stability, improved throughput performance, and reduced end-to-end delay, which make it preferable and scalable for multihop AmB-WSN.
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