research-article

BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter

Authors:

Dinesh Bharadia,

Kiran Raj Joshi,

Manikanta Kotaru,

Sachin KattiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 45, Issue 4

Pages 283 - 296

https://doi.org/10.1145/2829988.2787490

Published: 17 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We present BackFi, a novel communication system that enables high throughput, long range communication between very low power backscatter devices and WiFi APs using ambient WiFi transmissions as the excitation signal. Specifically, we show that it is possible to design devices and WiFi APs such that the WiFi AP in the process of transmitting data to normal WiFi clients can decode backscatter signals which the devices generate by modulating information on to the ambient WiFi transmission. We show via prototypes and experiments that it is possible to achieve communication rates of up to 5 Mbps at a range of 1 m and 1 Mbps at a range of 5 meters. Such performance is an order to three orders of magnitude better than the best known prior WiFi backscatter system [27,25]. BackFi design is energy efficient, as it relies on backscattering alone and needs insignificant power, hence the energy consumed per bit is small.

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Cited By

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Index Terms

BackFi: High Throughput WiFi Backscatter
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Spatial-temporal systems
      1. Sensor networks

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 45, Issue 4

SIGCOMM'15

October 2015

659 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/2829988

Editors:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain
,
Katerina Argyraki
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Hitesh Ballani
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
,
Fabián Bustamante
Northwestern University, USA
,
Joseph Camp
SMU, USA
,
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University, USA
,
Phillipa Gill
Stony Brook University, USA
,
Marco Mellia
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
,
Bhaskaran Raman
IIT Bombay, India
,
Joel Sommers
Colgate University, USA
,
Aline Carneiro Viana
INRIA, France

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGCOMM '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication
August 2015
684 pages
ISBN:9781450335423
DOI:10.1145/2785956
General Chairs:
Steve Uhlig
Queen Mary University of London, UK
,
Olaf Maennel
Tallinn U. of Technology in Estonia, Estonia
,
Program Chairs:
Brad Karp
University College London, UK
,
Jitendra Padhye
Microsoft, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 17 August 2015

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 45, Issue 4

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Cited By

Chae YLin ZBae KKim SPathak PVanbever LZhang I(2024)mmCombProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691919(1713-1729)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691919
Li XYuan YAn YJiang B(2024)A BLE 5.0 Extended Advertising Backscatter with Commodity Devices in Passive IoT ScenariosElectronics10.3390/electronics1305096113:5(961)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13050961
Zhao Y(2024)Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for 6G: applications, challenges, and solutions面向6G的可重构智能超表面: 应用、挑战和解决方案Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering10.1631/FITEE.220066624:12(1669-1688)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2200666
Zhong CZhai DLu YLi K(2024)Intelligent interference cancellation and ambient backscatter signal extraction for wireless-powered UAV IoT networkEURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing10.1186/s13634-024-01121-72024:1Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13634-024-01121-7
Meng QWang HZhang CSong YLi SLu LZhu HShu YLiu JTan RHe YChen J(2024)Processor-Sharing Internet of Things Architecture for Large-scale DeploymentProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699333(211-224)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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Ahmed MBansal AYuan KZhang JKumar SPapavassiliou SSchmid S(2024)Towards Ubiquitous IoT through Long Range Wireless Energy HarvestingProceedings of the Twenty-fifth International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing10.1145/3641512.3686379(21-30)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641512.3686379
Qin QChen KXie YLuo HFang DChen XGanesan DLane NShi W(2024)Pushing the Throughput Limit of OFDM-based Wi-Fi Backscatter CommunicationProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690672(968-983)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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Ma RHu WGanesan DShi W(2024)RF-Mediator: Tuning Medium Interfaces with Flexible MetasurfacesProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3649353(155-169)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
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Wang XPhan-Huy DWang X(2024)An OpenAirInterface-Based Ambient Backscatter Communication System Using Pilots2024 IEEE 99th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2024-Spring)10.1109/VTC2024-Spring62846.2024.10683474(1-5)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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