High-Efficiency Cellular Backscatter with Ambient Traffic

We present HEScatter, a high-efficiency ambient backscatter system that simultaneously improves carrier, power, and transmission efficiency. To improve carrier efficiency, we choose cellular signal as the carrier due to its continuous transmission nature. Specifically, to ensure low power, we design low-power periodic template matching based on the periodicity of cellular signals to trade time for synchronization accuracy. Further, we calibrate the drift introduced by Sampling Frequency Offset (SFO) to increase carrier utilization. In addition, we exploit Reference Signal (RS)-based demodulation to demodulate tag and ambient data from backscattered signals alone in various traffic patterns for efficient transmission.

We prototype HEScatter using off-the-shelf FPGAs and SDRs. Extensive experiments show that HEScatter performs well in carrier utilization, power consumption and data transmission. The carrier utilization rate of HEScatter is as high as 99.97%, which is 3.0x higher than the counterpart of SyncLTE. In end-to-end transmission, the energy efficiency of HEScatter is 1.6x and 19.2x higher than LScatter+ and SyncLTE, while LScatter suffers from transmission failures. We also demonstrate the high transmission efficiency of HEScatter, as its aggregate goodput is 1.5x and 3.8x better than LScatter+ and SyncLTE respectively.

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