LoRa Backscatter: Enabling The Vision of Ubiquitous Connectivity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wide-area backscatter system compatible with LoRa hardware, enabling reliable, long-range, low-power connectivity for everyday objects across large areas and diverse environments.

Contribution

It presents the first wide-area backscatter system capable of long-range communication, with a low-cost, low-power design compatible with commodity LoRa hardware.

Findings

Successful backscatter at 475 m range between RF source and receiver

Reliable communication across large indoor and outdoor areas

Low-cost, low-power backscatter device prototypes

Abstract

The vision of embedding connectivity into billions of everyday objects runs into the reality of existing communication technologies --- there is no existing wireless technology that can provide reliable and long-range communication at tens of microwatts of power as well as cost less than a dime. While backscatter is low-power and low-cost, it is known to be limited to short ranges. This paper overturns this conventional wisdom about backscatter and presents the first wide-area backscatter system. Our design can successfully backscatter from any location between an RF source and receiver, separated by 475 m, while being compatible with commodity LoRa hardware. Further, when our backscatter device is co-located with the RF source, the receiver can be as far as 2.8 km away. We deploy our system in a 4,800 $ft^{2}$ (446 $m^{2}$) house spread across three floors, a 13,024 $ft^{2}$ (1210 $m^{2}$) office area covering 41 rooms, as well as a one-acre (4046 $m^{2}$) vegetable farm and show that we can achieve reliable coverage, using only a single RF source and receiver. We also build a contact lens prototype as well as a flexible epidermal patch device attached to the human skin. We show that these devices can reliably backscatter data across a 3,328 $ft^{2}$ (309 $m^{2}$) room. Finally, we present a design sketch of a LoRa backscatter IC that shows that it costs less than a dime at scale and consumes only 9.25 $\mu$W of power, which is more than 1000x lower power than LoRa radio chipsets.