Turbocharging ambient backscatter communication

By Aaron N. Parks, Angli Liu, Shyamnath Gollakota, Joshua R. Smith. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2014

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Communication primitives such as coding and multiple antenna processing have provided significant benefits for traditional wireless systems. Existing designs, however, consume significant power and computational resources, and hence cannot be run on low complexity, power constrained backscatter devices. This paper makes two main contributions: (1) we introduce the first multi-antenna cancellation design that operates on backscatter devices while retaining a small form factor and power footprint, (2) we introduce a novel coding mechanism that enables long range communication as well as concurrent transmissions and can be decoded on backscatter devices. We build hardware prototypes of the above designs that can be powered solely using harvested energy from TV and solar sources. The results show that our designs provide benefits for both RFID and ambient backscatter systems: they enable RFID tags to communicate directly with each other at distances of tens of meters and through multiple walls. They also increase the communication rate and range achieved by ambient backscatter systems by 100X and 40X respectively. We believe that this paper represents a substantial leap in the capabilities of backscatter communication.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d16a2da2f85b4ab1c54c37e500b714df08de2390

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Ying-Chang Liang
2. Rui Zhang
3. Gang Yang
4. Dusist Niyato
5. Dong In Kim
6. Xiao Lu
7. Huayan Guo
8. Yiyang Pei

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Ying-Chang Liang
2. Rui Zhang
3. Gang Yang
4. Yiyang Pei
5. Dusist Niyato
6. Dong In Kim
7. Qianqian Zhang
8. Huayan Guo

Citations in the corpus

• 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.”
• Modulation in the Air: Backscatter Communication Over Ambient OFDM Carrier (2017, methodology): “Other methods are also proposed to address the problem of direct-link interference for AmBC [17], [18].”
• Ambient Backscatter Communications: A Contemporary Survey (2017, background): “[57] introduce μcode, a low-power encoding technique, to increase the communication range and ensure concurrent transmissions for ABCSs.”
• HitchHike: Practical Backscatter Using Commodity WiFi (2016, background): “Backscatter systems: In recent years, we have seen a significant throughput and communication range improvement of backscatter systems [30, 7, 1, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 25, 29, 26, 28, 33, 23, 27, 31, 34, 32].”
• PLoRa: a passive long-range data network from ambient LoRa transmissions (2018, methodology): “With a novel multiantenna cancellation and coding mechanism design, Turbo charging [28] extends theworking range of ambient backscatter to 27 m at a bitrate of 3.”
• Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors (2016, background): “There has been a lot of interest and activity in the area of backscatter-based communication and sensing in recent years [20, 23, 24, 25, 35, 41, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56].”
• Symbiotic Radio: A New Communication Paradigm for Passive Internet of Things (2018, methodology): “In [18] and [19], multiple receive antennas are used to suppress the DLI, while”
• Cooperative Ambient Backscatter Communications for Green Internet-of-Things (2018, methodology): “In [6], two receive antennas are used at the reader to cancel out the effect of the RF-source signal by calculating the ratio of the amplitudes of the signals received at the two antennas.”
• PASSIVE WI-FI: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions (2016, background): “Since 2013, we have introduced the concepts of ambient and Wi-Fi backscatter [25, 28, 37] where battery-free devices communicate with each other by backscattering ambient signals such as TV and Wi-Fi transmissions.”
• BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter (2015, background): “BackFi is also related to recent work on ambient backscatter communication [28, 34] that enables two RF powered devices to communicate with each other.”