Wi-fi backscatter

By Bryce Kellogg, Aaron N. Parks, Shyamnath Gollakota, Joshua R. Smith, David Wetherall. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2014

461 citations recorded by the source corpus.

RF-powered computers are small devices that compute and communicate using only the power that they harvest from RF signals. While existing technologies have harvested power from ambient RF sources (e.g., TV broadcasts), they require a dedicated gateway (like an RFID reader) for Internet connectivity. We present Wi-Fi Backscatter, a novel communication system that bridges RF-powered devices with the Internet. Specifically, we show that it is possible to reuse existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to RF-powered devices. To show Wi-Fi Backscatter's feasibility, we build a hardware prototype and demonstrate the first communication link between an RF-powered device and commodity Wi-Fi devices. We use off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices including Intel Wi-Fi cards, Linksys Routers, and our organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure, and achieve communication rates of up to 1 kbps and ranges of up to 2.1 meters. We believe that this new capability can pave the way for the rapid deployment and adoption of RF-powered devices and achieve ubiquitous connectivity via nearby mobile devices that are Wi-Fi enabled.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf231356bc2a817b5198b92ba8addb24156e54ed

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Modulation in the Air: Backscatter Communication Over Ambient OFDM Carrier (2017, background): “As in [3], [9], and [15], a short sequence of alternating ‘1’ and ‘0’ can be used as the wake-up preamble.”
Cooperative Ambient Backscatter Communications for Green Internet-of-Things (2018, background): “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].”
Inter-Technology Backscatter: Towards Internet Connectivity for Implanted Devices (2016, background): “Interscatter is related to our prior work on ambient and Wi-Fi backscatter communication [26,34,40] where devices communicate by backscattering ambient signals such as TV and Wi-Fi transmissions.”
BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter (2015, methodology): “For example, while a WiFi AP is transmitting a packet to a standard WiFi client, an IoT sensor should be able to modulate its own information on the ambient WiFi signal and communicate its own data back to the AP.”
Ambient Backscatter Communications: A Contemporary Survey (2017, background): “Hence, it is highly potential to capitalize the ubiquitous characteristics of conventional wireless systems to support low-cost, low-power backscatter communications systems [31], [32], [33].”
PASSIVE WI-FI: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions (2016, background): “Since Wi-Fi chipsets are designed to suppress adjacentband interference that occurs outside their Wi-Fi channel [9], they can easily decode the backscattered signal without the need for additional full-duplex hardware.”
Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors (2016, methodology): “This averaging can be done using an envelope detector in the analog domain (used in Ambient Backscatter [34]), or low pass filter in the digital domain (used in WiFi Backscatter [30]), after 0 20 40 60 80 100”
PLoRa: a passive long-range data network from ambient LoRa transmissions (2018, background): “,WISP [43], Ambient Backscatter [19], Wi-Fi backscatter [17] etc.”