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X-Tandem: Towards Multi-hop Backscatter Communication with Commodity WiFi

Published: 15 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Backscatter communication offers a cost- and energy-efficient means for IoT sensor data exchange. The IoT vision for ubiquitous interconnection, in practice, demands multi-hop connectivity for robust and scalable sensor networks, as well as compatibility with such prevailing wireless technologies as WiFi. Today's backscatter solutions however typically follow a single-hop paradigm, i.e., tags do not relay for each other. This paper presents X-Tandem, a multi-hop backscatter system that works with commodity WiFi devices. For the first time, we demonstrate that sensing tags can not only work as relays for each other but also modulate their sensing data into a single backscatter packet, which remains a legit WiFi packet that can be decoded with any commercial WiFi NICs. We discuss the design details of X-Tandem and have built a prototype with FPGAs and off-the-shelf WiFi devices. The prototype demonstrates a two-hop implementation, achieving a throughput up to 200 bps with tag-to-tag distances up to 0.4 m and communication ranges up to 8 m. Compared to single-hop solutions, X-Tandem can improve backscatter throughput by more than 10x in challenging indoor environments with obstacles.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiCom '18: Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
      October 2018
      884 pages
      ISBN:9781450359030
      DOI:10.1145/3241539
      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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      Publication History

      Published: 15 October 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. Backscatter
      2. Internet-of-Things
      3. Multi-hop
      4. WiFi

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      • Research-article

      Funding Sources

      • Canada Technology Demonstration Program (TDP) grant
      • NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship
      • Canada NSERC Discovery Grant
      • Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences CAS

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      MobiCom '18
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      MobiCom '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 187 submissions, 22%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

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