LoRea: A Backscatter Architecture that Achieves a Long Communication Range

TL;DR

LoRea is a novel backscatter communication architecture that significantly extends range and reduces cost by using narrow-band transmissions, frequency separation, and off-the-shelf carrier sources, enabling kilometer-range communication at low power.

Contribution

This work introduces LoRea, a low-cost, long-range backscatter system that overcomes power and range limitations of existing RFID and CRFID technologies.

Findings

Achieves up to 3.4 km range with 70 microwatts power at the tag.

Reduces system cost to approximately 70 USD.

Improves communication range over existing RFID systems.

Abstract

There is the long-standing assumption that radio communication in the range of hundreds of meters needs to consume mWs of power at the transmitting device. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case for some devices equipped with backscatter radios. We present LoRea an architecture consisting of a tag, a reader and multiple carrier generators that overcomes the power, cost and range limitations of existing systems such as Computational Radio Frequency Identification~(CRFID). LoRea achieves this by: First, generating narrow-band backscatter transmissions that improve receiver sensitivity. Second, mitigating self-interference without the complex designs employed on RFID readers by keeping carrier signal and backscattered signal apart in frequency. Finally, decoupling carrier generation from the reader and using devices such as WiFi routers and sensor nodes as a source of the carrier signal. An off-the-shelf implementation of LoRea costs 70 USD, a drastic reduction in price considering commercial RFID readers cost 2000 USD. LoRea's range scales with the carrier strength, and proximity to the carrier source and achieves a maximum range of 3.4 kilometre when the tag is located at 1 meter distance from a 28 dBm carrier source while consuming 70 microwatts at the tag. When the tag is equidistant from the carrier source and the receiver, we can communicate upto 75 meter, a significant improvement over existing RFID readers.