Are WiFi Backscatter Systems Ready for the Real World?

WiFi backscatter communication has been proposed to enable battery-free sensors to transmit data using WiFi networks. The main advantage of WiFi backscatter technologies over RFID is that data from their tags can be read using existing WiFi infrastructures instead of specialized readers. This can potentially reduce the complexity and cost of deploying battery-free sensors. Despite extensive work in this area, none of the existing systems are in widespread use today. We hypothesize that this is because WiFi-based backscatter tags do not scale well, and their range and capabilities are limited when compared with RFID. To test this hypothesis, we conduct several real-world experiments. We compare WiFi backscatter and RFID technologies in terms of energy consumption, throughput, range and scalability.