Mobile Backscatter Communication for the Battery-less Internet of Things

Abstract

We enable backscatter communication in the battery-less mobile Internet of Things (IoT). Backscatter communication is extensively studied in static settings. Existing designs are, however, fundamentally mismatched with mobility and time-varying energy patterns. Channel conditions rapidly fluctuate, impacting the achievable data rates and thus transmission costs. Energy availability varies unpredictably, possibly forcing devices to remain quiescent to recharge energy buffers. The two issues compound each other: while recharging, a battery-less mobile IoT device may miss more favorable channel conditions. We design a lightweight decision system that dynamically determines when to transmit by checking short-term trends in signal strength, while using Non-volatile Memory (NVM) to retain packets in unfavorable channel conditions and across energy failures. Using a prototype we built and real-world mobility and power traces, we compare our design against a rate-adaptive baseline that only considers the instantaneous channel conditions. Experimental results show that our system improves throughput by up to 5.16x while reducing transmission energy consumption by up to 47.3%, with only 0.23% - 7.3% additional energy overhead.