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Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air

Authors:

Joshua R. SmithAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

Pages 39 - 50

https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486015

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

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Abstract

We present the design of a communication system that enables two devices to communicate using ambient RF as the only source of power. Our approach leverages existing TV and cellular transmissions to eliminate the need for wires and batteries, thus enabling ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible.

To achieve this, we introduce ambient backscatter, a new communication primitive where devices communicate by backscattering ambient RF signals. Our design avoids the expensive process of generating radio waves; backscatter communication is orders of magnitude more power-efficient than traditional radio communication. Further, since it leverages the ambient RF signals that are already around us, it does not require a dedicated power infrastructure as in traditional backscatter communication. To show the feasibility of our design, we prototype ambient backscatter devices in hardware and achieve information rates of 1 kbps over distances of 2.5 feet and 1.5 feet, while operating outdoors and indoors respectively. We use our hardware prototype to implement proof-of-concepts for two previously infeasible ubiquitous communication applications.

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Index Terms

Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air
1. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks

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Reviews

Reviewer: Debraj De

With more and more tiny devices being embedded at all scales and in different physical environments, there are increasing challenges to manage energy resources and communication resource limits. One recent area of research involves the exploitation of existing ambient radio frequency (RF) signals, both for energy harvesting and for device-to-device communications. The authors of this paper have designed a novel communication and energy harvesting primitive and prototype that uses ambient RF TV signals and backscattering communication. The advantages of such a design are that these devices don't need any extra energy sources, and their communication systems are an order of magnitude more power efficient than traditional radio communications. This ambient backscatter communication system is more efficient than, but different from, a radio frequency identification (RFID) system (which requires an RFID reader) in the sense that it does not need to expend extra energy on inter-device communication. This design prototype has been able to achieve a data rate of 1 kilobit per second (kbps) over distances of 2.5 feet (outdoors) and 1.5 feet (indoors). The paper presents details about the system of RF TV signals that is exploited by the proposed backscatter system, and the hardware and component designs of the ambient backscattering transmitter and receiver. The two main functional designs of the receiver are: the extraction of backscatter information from ambient RF signals with a conventional digital receiver, and ultra-low-power receiver design using analog components with decoding. After the hardware was designed, the researchers designed the full network communication stack with modulation and bit encoding, packet transmission detection, packet formatting, and carrier sensing. Further key functionalities include multiple bit rates, collision avoidance, and the reduction of overhead for request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS-CTS) for hidden terminals. The complete prototype is evaluated with performance parameters such as the ratio of received power, the bit error rate (BER) with distance, carrier sensing (energy detection and preamble correction), and interference. Finally, the prototype is tested with two key ubiquitous applications that were previously infeasible: smart passive cards for billing and inventory management in retail. Overall, this paper makes a significant technical contribution and is recommended for readers interested in the future of low-power device-to-device communication and RF energy harvesting systems for smart environments, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, and applications for the Internet of Things. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

580 pages

ISBN:9781450320566

DOI:10.1145/2486001

General Chairs:
Dah Ming Chiu
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Jia Wang
AT&T Labs - Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents

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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2013

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SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference

August 12 - 16, 2013

Hong Kong, China

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SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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https://doi.org/10.3390/s24186018
Padmal MPiumwardane DRohner CVoigt T(2024)Channel Estimation for Analog Backscatter TagsProceedings of the First International Workshop on Radio Frequency (RF) Computing10.1145/3698386.3699989(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698386.3699989
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Cui ZFan DChen DWang GAi B(2024)Dynamic Self-Interference Cancellation for Mitigating PLL Non-Ideality in Backscatter Communications2024 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)10.1109/WCNC57260.2024.10570776(01-06)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2024
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