Wireless power communications based on backscatter, an alternative for IoT sensor development

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) vision calls for thousands interconnected devices in wearables, vehicles, buildings, using a multitude of sensors to provide us with useful information. Fully passive wireless networks are a key-enabling technologies for the Internet of things. Backscatter radios are a hypothesis to design these passive wireless networks. Backscatter modulation allows a remote device to wirelessly transfer information without requiring a traditional transceiver. Instead, a backscatter device leverages a carrier transmitted by an access point or base station. Nevertheless, the traditional approach is to use amplitude shift keying or phase shift keying backscatter solutions which limits the data rate of the sensors, since it transfers only one bit per symbol period. This talk will discuss new paradigms in backscatter communications. Backscatter communication provides an enabling technology to address the needs of IoT, due to the simplicity of the tag circuit and the ability to minimize the usage of batteries or even completely eliminate them taking advantage of wireless power transmission as well as energy harvesting. This talk presents the latest advances in backscatter communication technology, covering a wide range of topics, focusing on the combination of modulation constellation diagrams with the smith chart and further mm-wave solutions for extremely high bit rate approaches.