Abstract
Backscatter WiFi offers a novel low-cost and low-energy solution for RFID tags to communicate with existing WiFi devices. State-of-the-art backscatter WiFi solutions have seldom explored advanced features in the latest WiFi standards, in particular, spatial multiplexing, which has been the cornerstone for 802.11n and beyond. In this paper, we present MOXcatter, a WiFi backscatter communication system that works with spatial streams using commodity radios, while keeping the ongoing data communication unaffected. In MOXcatter, a backscatter tag can embed its sensing data on ambient spatial-stream packets, and both the sensing data and the original packets can be decoded by commodity WiFi devices. We have built a MOXcatter prototype with FPGAs and commodity WiFi devices. The experiments show that MOXcatter achieves up to 50 Kbps throughput for a single stream and up to 1 Kbps for double streams with a communication range (tag-to-RX) up to 14m. We discuss the tradeoffs therein and possible enhancements, and also showcase the applicability of our design through a sensor communication system.
Authors:
Jia Zhao, Wei Gong, Jiangchuan Liu.
Publication:
ACM MobiSys (CCF-B) [Link] [PDF]
Keywords:
WiFi Backscatter, Spatial Stream, Internet of Things
