Abstract
We investigate the performance of a monostatic multi-tag backscatter communication system with a general order tag selection criterion. In particular, we derive novel exact expressions for the average throughput and effective throughput. We further obtain simplified closed-form asymptotic expressions for the average and effective throughputs assuming a large number of tags. In addition, we obtain a unified exact expression for the average bit error rate, which is applicable to a wide class of binary modulation formats.