BeamScatter: Scalable, Deployable Long-Range backscatter communication with Beam-Steering

TL;DR

BeamScatter introduces a scalable, long-range WiFi backscatter system using MIMO beam-steering, enabling IoT devices to communicate over 28 meters with low power and high throughput, suitable for mesh networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel MIMO-based backscatter tag with beam-steering capabilities that significantly extend range and improve deployment in WiFi mesh networks.

Findings

Achieves 28m range from WiFi access points.

Operates at only 88 microWatts of power.

Reaches a peak throughput of 500 kbps.

Abstract

WiFi backscatter tags can enable direct connectivity of IoT devices with commodity WiFi hardware at low power. However, most state of the art backscatter tag implementations in this area have limited transmitter to tag range, are not suitable to be deployed in a WiFi mesh network, and do not take full advantage of today's WiFi network capabilities such as MIMO. In this paper, we present BeamScatter, which can realize a backscatter tag based on MIMO techniques that can work at a very long separation of 28m from an access-point and enables their deployment in WiFi mesh networks. BeamScatter presents a novel technique to perform beam-steering on the MIMO tag at a very low power consumption of 88 uW while achieving a peak throughput of 500kbps. Next, BeamScatter creates a novel modeling framework to decide the optimal phase setting on the tag to steer the backscattered signal WiFi access point.