The paper entitled “Dances with Blues: Harnessing Multi-Frequency Carriers for Commodity Bluetooth Backscatter” has been accepted for publication at the ACM CoNEXT 2023 conference. This paper introduces DanBlue, a Bluetooth backscatter system that can fully utilize multi-frequency Bluetooth signals as carriers. This work takes a crucial step forward on fully functioning battery-free Bluetooth.
The rapid development of the large-scale Internet of Things has increasingly higher requirements for low-power sensor nodes. As a passive communication technology, backscatter technology has extremely low power consumption and provides opportunities for passive IoT. Bluetooth backscatter systems develop rapidly due to the popularity of Bluetooth. However, existing work ignores that Bluetooth signals are frequency-hopping, which results in Bluetooth backscatter tags being unable to utilize multi-frequency carriers in practice, and node transmission efficiency is low.
Fig: the system framework of DanBlue
Bluetooth performs random frequency hopping based on channel selection algorithms. Due to the limited power budget, sensor nodes can not decode Bluetooth packets directly. The carrier frequency directly affects the backscatter channel. It is a challenge for sensor nodes to identify the carrier frequency. In addition, current Bluetooth nodes cannot transmit on any dynamic Bluetooth channel due to clock limitations, which prevents the nodes from being compatible with commercial devices. This paper proposes a Bluetooth backscatter system based on edge architecture. The nodes realize carrier frequency identification and channel frequency hopping with the cooperation of the edge server.
Maoran Jiang, is a doctoral candidate in the School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, and the corresponding author, Wei Gong, is a professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) projects (No. 61932017 and 61971390), and hardware services were provided by the Information Laboratory Center of the University of Science and Technology of China.
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3629133