A Distributed and Demand-Based Backscatter MAC Protocol for Internet of Things Networks

Backscatter communication is a new wireless communication technology, which can enable the battery-free device to communicate with others by backscattering ambient radio-frequency signal, and therefore has great potential to be deployed in future Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed and demand-based (DDB) medium access control (MAC) protocol for an IoT network, to support the coexistence of legacy Wi-Fi station and backscatter tag. In DDB, we consider the demand of the AP, and let Wi-Fi station and backscatter tag contend for the channel in a separate and distributed manner. In particular, when the AP needs to read the information of backscatter tag, only tag is allowed to contend for the channel in a distributed manner. When the AP does not need to read such information, however, only the Wi-Fi station is allowed to contend for the channel in a distributed manner. Extensive simulation results verify that our protocol is feasible, and our protocol can outperform the related protocol in terms of both per-node throughput and system throughput.