  Ambient backscatter, an emerging green communication technology, has aroused
great interest from both academia and industry. One open problem for ambient
backscatter communication (AmBC) systems is channel estimation for a
massive-antenna reader. In this paper, we focus on channel estimation problem
in AmBC systems with uniform linear array (ULA) at the reader which consists of
large number of antennas. We first design a two-step method to jointly estimate
channel gains and direction of arrivals (DoAs), and then refine the estimates
through angular rotation. Additionally, Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) are
derived for both the modulus of the channel gain and the DoA estimates.
Simulations are then provided to validate the analysis, and to show the
efficiency of the proposed approach.
