In a significant advancement in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) communications, the latest work of Yifan Yang and Professor Wei Gong from the Ubiquitous Battery-free Internet of Things Laboratory has been officially accepted for publication by the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, a CCF A journal. This innovative research introduces STScatter, a universal WiFi backscatter for space-time streams, marking a leap in low-power communication technology.
Backscatter communication is a technique that enables IoT nodes to communicate passively by reflecting radio frequency (RF) signals, recognized for its low power consumption and ease of support. The widespread construction of wireless infrastructure provides a plethora of readily available wireless signals, creating favorable conditions for deploying environmental backscatter systems. Compared to traditional Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, these systems directly utilize these wireless signals without the need for specially deployed signal generators, making them more favored in IoT applications, including environmental monitoring, smart housing, and personal health devices.
Despite the potential applications of backscatter communication, previous attempts at exploiting space-time stream backscatter faced some difficulties. The main challenges were the modulation of various tag data on different types of environmental space-time stream signals and the difficulty of passively identifying space-time streams properties. These challenges significantly limited the efficiency and applicability of existing backscatter communication systems.
To address these challenges, STScatter proposes a solution that effectively utilizes readily available multifarious space-time streams. Unlike existing backscattering, STScatter can achieve symbol-level efficient tag data modulation on multifarious space-time streams and decode environmental data and backscattered data simultaneously from the backscatter signals. STScatter employs commercial FPGA and SDR for prototyping, demonstrating its versatility and robustness in various transmitter types and environmental space-time streams. The system achieved an goodput of up to 455.9kbps under single-stream excitation and 460.0kbps under multi-stream excitation, significantly outperforming existing systems like MOXcatter. Moreover, STScatter performed excellently in real scenarios, using signals from various WiFi hardware for excitation and achieving an average effective transmission rate of 293.62kbps for tag data under real file download traffic.
Fig：STScatter
The paper was co-authored by Yifan Yang and Professor Wei Gong. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) projects (numbers 61932017 and 61971390), with hardware services provided by the Information Science Experiment Center of USTC. Yifan Yang is a joint Ph.D. student of the School of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China and the School of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong, and the corresponding author, Professor Wei Gong, is a professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology and the School of Data Science at the University of Science and Technology of China, as well as the head of the Ubiquitous Battery-free Internet of Things Laboratory.
Paper link:
Full paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10347566