Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air

By Vincent Liu, Aaron N. Parks, Vamsi Talla, Shyamnath Gollakota, David Wetherall, Joshua R. Smith. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2013

1,446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the design of a communication system that enables two devices to communicate using ambient RF as the only source of power. Our approach leverages existing TV and cellular transmissions to eliminate the need for wires and batteries, thus enabling ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible. To achieve this, we introduce ambient backscatter, a new communication primitive where devices communicate by backscattering ambient RF signals. Our design avoids the expensive process of generating radio waves; backscatter communication is orders of magnitude more power-efficient than traditional radio communication. Further, since it leverages the ambient RF signals that are already around us, it does not require a dedicated power infrastructure as in traditional backscatter communication. To show the feasibility of our design, we prototype ambient backscatter devices in hardware and achieve information rates of 1 kbps over distances of 2.5 feet and 1.5 feet, while operating outdoors and indoors respectively. We use our hardware prototype to implement proof-of-concepts for two previously infeasible ubiquitous communication applications.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8baf50e91121229e9ee2239d64231bc3b5e23c0

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Citations in the corpus

6G Wireless Communication Systems: Applications, Requirements, Technologies, Challenges, and Research Directions (2019, background): “Backscatter Communication: Ambient backscatter wireless communication enables interaction between two batteryless devices by using existing RF signals such as ambient television and cellular transmissions [68].”
Symbiotic Radio: A New Communication Paradigm for Passive Internet of Things (2018, background): “, cellular and WiFi signals) to transmit its information [10].”
Harvest-Then-Cooperate: Wireless-Powered Cooperative Communications (2014, background): “As an example, the successful communication between two terminals solely powered by ambient radio signals, such as the existing TV and cellular signals, has been realized and reported in [4].”
PLoRa: a passive long-range data network from ambient LoRa transmissions (2018, background): “,WISP [43], Ambient Backscatter [19], Wi-Fi backscatter [17] etc.”
HitchHike: Practical Backscatter Using Commodity WiFi (2016, background): “[21] leverages TV signals and enables backscatter communication between two battery-less devices.”
Turbocharging ambient backscatter communication (2014, background): “As described in §4, our design can overcome the design limitation of [24] and achieve significantly higher ranges.”
6G and Beyond: The Future of Wireless Communications Systems (2020, methodology): “…design, a simple switch consisting of a transistor and connected to the antenna can be used to modulate the impedance of the antenna: a mismatch of impedance indicates a reﬂection mode of the impinging signals, whereas a matched impedance allows for the signal being absorbed by the antenna [139].”
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].”
Terahertz Band: The Last Piece of RF Spectrum Puzzle for Communication Systems (2019, background): “Ambient backscatter communication has emerged as an energy-efficient technique suitable for IoT applications [290].”
Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems: Detection and Performance Analysis (2016, background): “To further increase the field coverage and communication range or avoid the round-tip path loss, bistatic scatter [13] and ambient backscatter [14], [15] have been proposed.”
Inter-Technology Backscatter: Towards Internet Connectivity for Implanted Devices (2016, methodology): “of-conceptcredit card form factor devices shown in Fig. 17 that backscatter the single-tone from the Bluetooth device to communicate between each other. We replicate prior work on ambient backscatter [34] and use its receiver architecture. We however, tune the hardware to operate at 2.4 GHz instead ”
Ambient Backscatter Communications: A Contemporary Survey (2017, methodology): “3) Advantages and Limitations: In ABCSs, as the backscatter transmitters can be designed with low-cost and low-power components, the system costs as well as system power consumption can be significantly lowered [12].”
Wi-fi backscatter (2014, background): “It is increasingly becoming feasible to perform low-end computing, sensing, and more recently communication [17] by harvesting”
Tagoram: real-time tracking of mobile RFID tags to high precision using COTS devices (2014, background): “Liu et al. present a new communication system that enables two battery-free devices to communicate using ambient RF as the only source of power. which might open a new tracking technique among tags within few centimeter [25].”