  Backscatter communication (BSC) is being realized as the core technology for
pervasive sustainable Internet-of-Things applications. However, owing to the
resource-limitations of passive tags, the efficient usage of multiple antennas
at the reader is essential for both downlink excitation and uplink detection.
This work targets at maximizing the achievable sum-backscattered-throughput by
jointly optimizing the transceiver (TRX) design at the reader and
backscattering coefficients (BC) at the tags. Since, this joint problem is
nonconvex, we first present individually-optimal designs for the TRX and BC. We
show that with precoder and {combiner} designs at the reader respectively
targeting downlink energy beamforming and uplink Wiener filtering operations,
the BC optimization at tags can be reduced to a binary power control problem.
Next, the asymptotically-optimal joint-TRX-BC designs are proposed for both low
and high signal-to-noise-ratio regimes. Based on these developments, an
iterative low-complexity algorithm is proposed to yield an efficient
jointly-suboptimal design. Thereafter, we discuss the practical utility of the
proposed designs to other application settings like wireless powered
communication networks and BSC with imperfect channel state information.
Lastly, selected numerical results, validating the analysis and shedding novel
insights, demonstrate that the proposed designs can yield significant
enhancement in the sum-backscattered throughput over existing benchmarks.
