Abstract: The origin of backscatter technology has been widely applied in logistics domain. One of the successful commercial applications of backscatter technology is electronic toll collection (ETC). Recently, with the extensive usage of Internet of Things (IoT), both academic world and industrial world proposes several new types of backscatter technologies for communications. The history of both IoT and backscatter was reviewed, the rising communication technologies of backscatter was concluded, their potential applications were predicted, and the coming challenges were analyzed, such as wireless energy harvesting, signal detection, multiple access, capacity bounds and security.