NetScatter: Enabling Large-Scale Backscatter Networks

TL;DR

NetScatter introduces a scalable wireless protocol for backscatter networks, enabling hundreds of devices to transmit simultaneously with significant improvements in throughput and latency, using a novel distributed coding mechanism.

Contribution

The paper presents the first scalable protocol for large backscatter networks that decodes numerous concurrent transmissions with a single FFT, addressing synchronization and near-far issues.

Findings

Supports 256 devices with only 500 kHz bandwidth

Achieves 14-62x throughput improvements

Attains 15-67x latency reductions

Abstract

We present the first wireless protocol that scales to hundreds of concurrent transmissions from backscatter devices. Our key innovation is a distributed coding mechanism that works below the noise floor, operates on backscatter devices and can decode all the concurrent transmissions at the receiver using a single FFT operation. Our design addresses practical issues such as timing and frequency synchronization as well as the near-far problem. We deploy our design using a testbed of backscatter hardware and show that our protocol scales to concurrent transmissions from 256 devices using a bandwidth of only 500 kHz. Our results show throughput and latency improvements of 14--62x and 15--67x over existing approaches and 1--2 orders of magnitude higher transmission concurrency.