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LoRa Backscatter: Enabling The Vision of Ubiquitous Connectivity

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The vision of embedding connectivity into billions of everyday objects runs into the reality of existing communication technologies -- there is no existing wireless technology that can provide reliable and long-range communication at tens of microwatts of power as well as cost less than a dime. While backscatter is low-power and low-cost, it is known to be limited to short ranges. This paper overturns this conventional wisdom about backscatter and presents the first wide-area backscatter system. Our design can successfully backscatter from any location between an RF source and receiver, separated by 475 m, while being compatible with commodity LoRa hardware. Further, when our backscatter device is co-located with the RF source, the receiver can be as far as 2.8 km away. We deploy our system in a 4,800 ft2 (446 m2) house spread across three floors, a 13,024 ft2 (1210 m2) office area covering 41 rooms, as well as a one-acre (4046 m2) vegetable farm and show that we can achieve reliable coverage, using only a single RF source and receiver. We also build a contact lens prototype as well as a flexible epidermal patch device attached to the human skin. We show that these devices can reliably backscatter data across a 3,328 ft2 (309 m2) room. Finally, we present a design sketch of a LoRa backscatter IC that shows that it costs less than a dime at scale and consumes only 9.25 μW of power, which is more than 1000x lower power than LoRa radio chipsets.

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      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
      Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 3
      September 2017
      2023 pages
      EISSN:2474-9567
      DOI:10.1145/3139486
      Issue’s Table of Contents
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      Publication History

      Published: 11 September 2017
      Accepted: 01 August 2017
      Revised: 01 July 2017
      Received: 01 May 2017
      Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. Energy-aware communication 8 Novel physical layer technologies
      2. Wireless
      3. mobile
      4. sensor networks

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