Energy-Efficient WiFi Backscatter Communication for Green IoTs

TL;DR

EEWScatter is an innovative WiFi backscatter system that significantly reduces energy consumption in IoT devices by reusing ambient signals and employing ultra-low-power, battery-free tags, advancing sustainable IoT development.

Contribution

The paper introduces EEWScatter, a novel energy-efficient WiFi backscatter system with a CRC-based algorithm enabling single-receiver data demodulation, reducing power use and system complexity.

Findings

Achieves at least 50% energy savings compared to existing systems.

Tag power consumption is only 1/1000 of active radios.

System demonstrates lowest overall power consumption among similar solutions.

Abstract

The boom of the Internet of Things has revolutionized people's lives, but it has also resulted in massive resource consumption and environmental pollution. Recently, Green IoT (GIoT) has become a worldwide consensus to address this issue. In this paper, we propose EEWScatter, an energy-efficient WiFi backscatter communication system to pursue the goal of GIoT. Unlike previous backscatter systems that solely focus on tags, our approach offers a comprehensive system-wide view on energy conservation. Specifically, we reuse ambient signals as carriers and utilize an ultra-low-power and battery-free design for tag nodes by backscatter. Further, we design a new CRC-based algorithm that enables the demodulation of both ambient and tag data by only a single receiver while using ambient carriers. Such a design eliminates system reliance on redundant transceivers with high power consumption. Results demonstrate that EEWScatter achieves the lowest overall system power consumption and saves at least half of the energy. What's more, the power consumption of our tag is only 1/1000 of that of active radio. We believe that EEWScatter is a critical step towards a sustainable future.