Homoscatter: Towards efficient connectivity for ZigBee backscatter system

TL;DR

Homoscatter is a new ZigBee backscatter system that improves spectral efficiency and communication reliability by using continuous phase change modulation and codeword translation, enabling more practical IoT connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ZigBee backscatter design with continuous phase change modulation and header translation, reducing spectral leakage and enhancing channel utilization.

Findings

Achieves 3x smaller bandwidth than Interscatter

Reaches 13 kbps data rate with continuous phase modulation

Demonstrates practical IoT connectivity improvements

Abstract

Recent advances in backscatter open a promising direction for ultra-low power communication. However, the state-of-art ZigBee backscatter system, Interscatter, has several drawbacks to deploy. Its backscatter tag and exciting source, Bluetooth, can hardly decode packets from other ZigBee nodes, which left Interscatter one-way communication. Besides, it adopts instantaneous phase change to modulate information, producing obvious sidelobes and interfering devices working on neighboring channels severely. To address the problems mentioned above, we introduce Homoscatter, a novel ZigBee backscatter system that adopts specific ZigBee devices to generate a single tone and leverages continuous phase change to modulate information, which eliminates spectral leakage. It also does codeword translation on the packet header of exciting packets, improving the utilization of ambient signal. The prototype of Homoscatter consists of a microchip radio, a backscatter tag, and a commodity receiver. The evaluations show that the occupied bandwidth of Homoscatter achieves 3x smaller than Interscatter. When the channel capacity is 17.5 kbps, the continuous phase change modulation achieves 13 kbps with the codeword translation on the excitation header. Based on the widely spread IoT devices, Homoscatter is a practical way to build an efficient connection between IoT devices.