Efficient and reliable low-power backscatter networks

By Jue Wang, Haitham Hassanieh, Dina Katabi, Piotr Indyk. 2012

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a long-standing vision of embedding backscatter nodes like RFIDs into everyday objects to build ultra-low power ubiquitous networks. A major problem that has challenged this vision is that backscatter communication is neither reliable nor efficient. Backscatter nodes cannot sense each other, and hence tend to suffer from colliding transmissions. Further, they are ineffective at adapting the bit rate to channel conditions, and thus miss opportunities to increase throughput, or transmit above capacity causing errors. This paper introduces a new approach to backscatter communication. The key idea is to treat all nodes as if they were a single virtual sender. One can then view collisions as a code across the bits transmitted by the nodes. By ensuring only a few nodes collide at any time, we make collisions act as a sparse code and decode them using a new customized compressive sensing algorithm. Further, we can make these collisions act as a rateless code to automatically adapt the bit rate to channel quality --i.e., nodes can keep colliding until the base station has collected enough collisions to decode. Results from a network of backscatter nodes communicating with a USRP backscatter base station demonstrate that the new design produces a 3.5× throughput gain, and due to its rateless code, reduces message loss rate in challenging scenarios from 50% to zero.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Over-the-air Function Computation in Sensor Networks (2016, background): “Systems like ZigZag [15], Buzz [25], Caraoke [2], and compressive sensing [4, 6], treat wireless collisions as a code and decode the bits despite interference.”
— Invited Paper — Backscatter Communication and RFID: Coding, Energy, and MIMO Analysis (2014, background): “Enhancements include a new space-frequency division random access scheme in [16], as well as multi-user detection [17] [18] in conjunction with rateless codes [19].”
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].”
Caraoke: An E-Toll Transponder Network for Smart Cities (2015, unknown): “We note however that past works [58, 34] proposed methods to decode concurrent transmissions from backscatter sensors in time domain.”
AirShare: Distributed coherent transmission made seamless (2015, methodology): “We have used our AirShare-equipped USRPs to emulate ZigBee sensors and perform distributed modulation and rate adaptation as described in [16].”
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].”
Wi-fi backscatter (2014, background): “Wi-Fi Backscatter is related to work on RFID systems [8, 28, 29], which use dedicated powered infrastructure (RFID readers) to provide power and enable communication with battery-free tags.”
Turbocharging ambient backscatter communication (2014, methodology): “Finally, prior work has proposed to use CDMA to address the problem of collisions in RFID networks [37, 5, 27, 39].”
PLoRa: a passive long-range data network from ambient LoRa transmissions (2018, background): “Passive RFID [14, 42] p Ambient backscatter [19] p p Turbo charging [28] p p Wi-Fi backscatter [17] p p Passive Wi-Fi [18] p HitchHike [46] p FS-Backscatter [49] p FM Backscatter [41] p p LoRa backscatter [38] p p LoRea [40] p FreeRider [48] p PLoRa p p p reader, but only works over a limited range ”
Ambient Backscatter Communications: A Contemporary Survey (2017, background): “, two-dimensional signaling Support several forms of QAM such as 2-QAM, 4-QAM, 8-QAM, and 32-QAM Increase the efficiency of transmissions Susceptible to noise, require power-hungry linear amplifiers [76] [77] [78], [79] [75]”
BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter (2015, background): “BackFi is related to a large body of work on RFID systems [19, 55, 50, 49, 23, 22, 52, 46, 45, 54, 14, 3], which use dedicated, powered reader infrastructure to supply power as well as receive data from the RFID IoT sensors [30].”