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Inter-technology Backscatter Communication: A Bidirectional Zigbee-BLE System

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Wireless Artificial Intelligent Computing Systems and Applications (WASA 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14998))

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Abstract

With the development of IoT (Internet of Things), the number of communication devices will grow rapidly, which leads to a higher requirement for devices’ power consumption. Thus, Zigbee backscatter is a promising research direction, as Zigbee devices are ultra-low power, and the power can be further reduced by utilizing backscatter technique. Considering the need for the research on Zigbee backscatter and widespread ambient BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) signals, we proposed an inter-technology backscatter system in which the tag can create Zigbee-compatible signals over ambient BLE carriers. Previous similar backscatter systems used BLE single-tone carriers, which are generated by setting BLE packets to specific values. Compared with them, our backscatter tag can utilize widespread ambient BLE signals as carriers and is much easier to widely deploy. In addition, by using BLE extended advertising packets as carriers, we significantly improved the goodput. Besides these, we constructed a reverse data path from the Zigbee device to the tag by utilizing the BLE carrier provider as a relay, which enables the Zigbee receiver to communicate to the BLE excitation and the tag at the same time. We have done some experiments and have successfully verified the feasibility of the system. The experimental results show that our system has a comparable BER (bit error rate) to the systems that used single-tone carriers and can achieve a goodput of up to 23.2 kbps.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the NSFC under Grants 62276244 and 62302475, as well as the Anhui Provincial Key Research and Development Project 2022j11020003. The authors would like to thank the Information Science Laboratory Center of USTC for the hardware and software services.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Kailai Yan, Zhaoyuan Xu & Wei Gong

Authors
  1. Kailai Yan
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  2. Zhaoyuan Xu
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  3. Wei Gong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei Gong .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Zhipeng Cai

  2. Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA

    Daniel Takabi

  3. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Shaoyong Guo

  4. Shandong University, Qingdao, China

    Yifei Zou

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Yan, K., Xu, Z., Gong, W. (2025). Inter-technology Backscatter Communication: A Bidirectional Zigbee-BLE System. In: Cai, Z., Takabi, D., Guo, S., Zou, Y. (eds) Wireless Artificial Intelligent Computing Systems and Applications. WASA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14998. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71467-2_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71467-2_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-71466-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-71467-2

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