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Spatial Stream Backscatter Using Commodity WiFi

Published: 10 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Backscatter WiFi offers a novel low-cost and low-energy solution for RFID tags to communicate with existing WiFi devices. State-of-the-art backscatter WiFi solutions have seldom explored advanced features in the latest WiFi standards, in particular, spatial multiplexing, which has been the cornerstone for 802.11n and beyond. In this paper, we present MOXcatter, a WiFi backscatter communication system that works with spatial streams using commodity radios, while keeping the ongoing data communication unaffected. In MOXcatter, a backscatter tag can embed its sensing data on ambient spatial-stream packets, and both the sensing data and the original packets can be decoded by commodity WiFi devices. We have built a MOXcatter prototype with FPGAs and commodity WiFi devices. The experiments show that MOXcatter achieves up to 50 Kbps throughput for a single stream and up to 1 Kbps for double streams with a communication range (tag-to-RX) up to 14 m. We discuss the tradeoffs therein and possible enhancements, and also showcase the applicability of our design through a sensor communication system.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiSys '18: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
      June 2018
      560 pages
      ISBN:9781450357203
      DOI:10.1145/3210240
      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]

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      Published: 10 June 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. Internet of Things
      2. Spatial Stream
      3. WiFi Backscatter

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      • (2024)Pushing the Throughput Limit of OFDM-based Wi-Fi Backscatter CommunicationProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690672(968-983)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
      • (2024)Indoor Backscattering Communication by Using Commercial LTE Pilots2024 IEEE 99th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2024-Spring)10.1109/VTC2024-Spring62846.2024.10683260(1-5)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
      • (2024)PilotScatter: High-Throughput OFDM Backscatter via Pilot TonesIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications10.1109/TWC.2024.343933923:11(16248-16260)Online publication date: Nov-2024
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