TY - JOUR
T1 - Ambient Backscatterers using FM Broadcasting for Low Cost and Low Power Wireless Applications
AU - Daskalakis, Spyridion-Nektarios
AU - Kimionis, John
AU - Collado, Ana
AU - Goussetis, George
AU - Tentzeris, Manos M.
AU - Georgiadis, Apostolos
PY - 2017/11/9
Y1 - 2017/11/9
N2 - Nowadays, the explosive growth of Internet-of-Things-related applications has required the design of low-cost and low-power wireless sensors. Although backscatter radio communication is a mature technology used in radio frequency (RF) identification applications, ambient backscattering is a novel approach taking advantage of ambient signals to simplify wireless system topologies to just a sensor node and a receiver (RX) circuit eliminating the need for a dedicated carrier source. This paper introduces a novel wireless tag and RX system that utilizes broadcast frequency modulated (FM) signals for backscatter communication. The proposed proof-of-concept tag comprises of an ultralow-power microcontroller (MCU) and a RF front-end for wireless communication. The MCU can accumulate data from multiple sensors through an analog-to-digital converter, while it transmits the information back to the RX through the front-end by means of backscattering. The front-end uses ON-OFF keying modulation and FM0 encoding on ambient FM station signals. The RX consists of a commercial low-cost software-defined radio which downconverts the received signal to baseband and decodes it using a suitable signal processing algorithm. A theoretical analysis of the error rate performance of the system is provided and compared to bit-error-rate measurements on a fixed transmitter-tag-RX laboratory setup with good agreement. The prototype tag was also tested in a real-time indoor laboratory deployment. Operation over a 5-m tag-reader distance was demonstrated by backscattering information at 2.5 kb/s featuring an energy per packet of 36.9~mu text{J}.
AB - Nowadays, the explosive growth of Internet-of-Things-related applications has required the design of low-cost and low-power wireless sensors. Although backscatter radio communication is a mature technology used in radio frequency (RF) identification applications, ambient backscattering is a novel approach taking advantage of ambient signals to simplify wireless system topologies to just a sensor node and a receiver (RX) circuit eliminating the need for a dedicated carrier source. This paper introduces a novel wireless tag and RX system that utilizes broadcast frequency modulated (FM) signals for backscatter communication. The proposed proof-of-concept tag comprises of an ultralow-power microcontroller (MCU) and a RF front-end for wireless communication. The MCU can accumulate data from multiple sensors through an analog-to-digital converter, while it transmits the information back to the RX through the front-end by means of backscattering. The front-end uses ON-OFF keying modulation and FM0 encoding on ambient FM station signals. The RX consists of a commercial low-cost software-defined radio which downconverts the received signal to baseband and decodes it using a suitable signal processing algorithm. A theoretical analysis of the error rate performance of the system is provided and compared to bit-error-rate measurements on a fixed transmitter-tag-RX laboratory setup with good agreement. The prototype tag was also tested in a real-time indoor laboratory deployment. Operation over a 5-m tag-reader distance was demonstrated by backscattering information at 2.5 kb/s featuring an energy per packet of 36.9~mu text{J}.
U2 - 10.1109/TMTT.2017.2765635
DO - 10.1109/TMTT.2017.2765635
M3 - Article
SN - 0018-9480
VL - 65
SP - 5251
EP - 5262
JO - IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques
JF - IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques
IS - 12
ER -