skip to main content
10.1145/3127882.3127888acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobicomConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Towards Wide-area Backscatter Networks

Published: 16 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Backscatter communication --- reflecting or absorbing ambient wireless signals --- enables transmissions at several orders of magnitude lower energy cost when compared to conventional low-power radios. The past few years have seen signficiant progress with systems demonstrating the ability to synthesise transmissions that are compatible with WiFi, ZigBee or BLE at μWs of power consumption. However, these systems achieve a maximum communication range of tens of meters which severely limits the possible applications. On the other hand, our recent system LoRea demonstrates that backscatter communication can achieve a significantly longer range reaching up to a few kms when the tag is co-located with the carrier source. In our vision, such a large range could be a key enabler to develop wide-area networks of battery-free sensors. In this paper, we build on our system LoRea and identify issues of improving the reliability of weak backscatter links, increasing the range and supporting the operation of multiple tags as the key challenge to our vision, and present our preliminary efforts to address them.

References

[1]
Francesco Amato et al. A 45 μW bias power, 34 dB gain reflection amplifier exploiting the tunneling effect for RFID applications. In IEEE RFID 2015.
[2]
Joshua Ensworth. 2017. Ultra-low-power Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) compatible backscatter communication and energy harvesting for battery-free wearable devices. Ph.D. Dissertation.
[3]
Bryce Kellogg et al. Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions NSDI 2016.
[4]
J. F. Ensworth et al. Every smart phone is a backscatter reader: Modulated backscatter compatibility with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (BLE) devices IEEE RFID 2015.
[5]
Jerold Heller and Irwin Jacobs. 1971. Viterbi decoding for satellite and space communication. IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology (1971).
[6]
Pan Hu et al. Braidio: An Integrated Active-Passive Radio for Mobile Devices with Asymmetric Energy Budgets ACM SIGCOMM 2016.
[7]
Pan Hu et al. 2015. Laissez-faire: Fully asymmetric backscatter communication ACM SIGCOMM 2015.
[8]
Vikram Iyer et al. Inter-Technology Backscatter: Towards Internet Connectivity for Implanted Devices ACM SIGCOMM 2016.
[9]
Vincent Liu et al. Ambient Backscatter: Wireless Communication out of Thin Air ACM SIGCOMM 2013.
[10]
Brandon Lucia, Vignesh Balaji, Alexei Colin, Kiwan Maeng, and Emily Ruppel Intermittent Computing: Challenges and Opportunities. (????).
[11]
Jiajue Ou et al. 2015. Come and be served: Parallel decoding for cots rfid tags ACM MOBICOM 2015.
[12]
Aaron N. Parks et al. Turbocharging Ambient Backscatter Communication. ACM SIGCOMM 2014.
[13]
Olivier BA SELLER and Nicolas Sornin. 2016. Low power long range transmitter. (2016). US Patent 9,252,834.
[14]
Vamsi Talla et al. 2017. LoRa Backscatter: Enabling The Vision of Ubiquitous Connectivity ACM Ubicomp 2017.
[15]
David Tse et al. Fundamentals of Wireless Communication. In CAMBRIDGE.
[16]
Ambuj Varshney et al. 2017. LoRea: A Backscatter Architecture that Achieves a Long Communication Range ACM SENSYS 2017.
[17]
Pengyu Zhang et al. Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors ACM SIGCOMM 2016.
[18]
Pengyu Zhang et al. HitchHike: Practical Backscatter using Commodity WiFi ACM SENSYS 2016.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Performance Analysis of LoRa-Enabled Backscatter Communication2024 IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC)10.1109/ICCC62479.2024.10681685(1092-1097)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2022)Chipnet: Enabling Large-scale Backscatter Network with Processor-free DevicesACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/354449218:4(1-26)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
  • (2022)JudoProceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3498361.3538923(273-286)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HotWireless '17: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Wireless
October 2017
68 pages
ISBN:9781450351409
DOI:10.1145/3127882
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 October 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. backscatter
  2. battery-free sensors
  3. long range communication
  4. lora

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

MobiCom '17
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

HotWireless '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 16 submissions, 63%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 30 of 42 submissions, 71%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)20
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Performance Analysis of LoRa-Enabled Backscatter Communication2024 IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC)10.1109/ICCC62479.2024.10681685(1092-1097)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2022)Chipnet: Enabling Large-scale Backscatter Network with Processor-free DevicesACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/354449218:4(1-26)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
  • (2022)JudoProceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3498361.3538923(273-286)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
  • (2021)LiteNap: Downclocking LoRa ReceptionIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.309699029:6(2632-2645)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2021
  • (2021)Performance Analysis of LoRa-Backscatter Communication System in AWGN Channels2021 4th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technologies and Networking (CommNet)10.1109/CommNet52204.2021.9641890(1-5)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
  • (2020)Two to tangoProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3386901.3388918(80-93)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Tunnel emitterProceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3372224.3419199(1-14)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2020
  • (2020)LiteNap: Downclocking LoRa ReceptionIEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM41043.2020.9155224(2321-2330)Online publication date: Jul-2020
  • (2018)Connecting Battery-free IoT Tags Using LED BulbsProceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3286062.3286077(99-105)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2018
  • (2017)LoReaProceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems10.1145/3131672.3136996(1-2)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2017

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media