BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter

By Dinesh Bharadia, Kiran Raj Joshi, Manikanta Kotaru, Sachin Rajsekhar Katti. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2015

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present BackFi, a novel communication system that enables high throughput, long range communication between very low power backscatter devices and WiFi APs using ambient WiFi transmissions as the excitation signal. Specifically, we show that it is possible to design devices and WiFi APs such that the WiFi AP in the process of transmitting data to normal WiFi clients can decode backscatter signals which the devices generate by modulating information on to the ambient WiFi transmission. We show via prototypes and experiments that it is possible to achieve communication rates of up to 5 Mbps at a range of 1 m and 1 Mbps at a range of 5 meters. Such performance is an order to three orders of magnitude better than the best known prior WiFi backscatter system [27,25]. BackFi design is energy efficient, as it relies on backscattering alone and needs insignificant power, hence the energy consumed per bit is small.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91bdacc904edb540fa57ea9a4535a1a1d79d855b

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Citations in the corpus

Modulation in the Air: Backscatter Communication Over Ambient OFDM Carrier (2017, methodology): “A WiFi backscatter system is proposed in [18], in which the WiFi AP decodes the received backscattered signal from BD while simultaneously transmitting WiFi packages to a standard WiFi client.”
Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems: Detection and Performance Analysis (2016, methodology): “In 2015, full-duplex technology was introduced with WiFi access point (AP) to cooperate with backscatter to enlarge data throughput [16].”
Cooperative Ambient Backscatter Communications for Green Internet-of-Things (2018, methodology): “Without loss of generality, we assume Rs = KRc with K being a positive integer, since the A-BD data rate is typically smaller than the source data rate [1], [7], [12], [13].”
Ambient Backscatter Communications: A Contemporary Survey (2017, methodology): “BackFi is different from RFID systems since it reuses ambient signals from the Wi-Fi AP which is already deployed for standard wireless networks.”
Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors (2016, methodology): “BackFi [9] modifies a WiFi Access Point (AP) by augmenting it with the ability to cancel the OFDM carrier signal.”
HitchHike: Practical Backscatter Using Commodity WiFi (2016, background): “Consequently, a backscatter system that can be deployed using commodity WiFi radios on access points, smartphones, watches and tablets, does not exist.”
PASSIVE WI-FI: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions (2016, background): “Over the past few years, researchers have explored the concept of Wi-Fi backscatter [25, 38] that creates an additional narrowband data stream to ride on top of existing Wi-Fi signals.”