Efficient Single-Symbol Backscatter With Uncontrolled Ambient OFDM WiFi

The use of controlled excitation makes pervasive backscatter communication difficult to achieve and the redundant modulation severely limits the performance of the system. We present a novel WiFi backscatter system that can take uncontrolled OFDM WiFi signals as excitations and efficiently embed tag data at the single-symbol rate. Specifically, we are the first to discover the fundamental reason why the previous systems have to rely on multi-symbol modulation, which makes it possible to demodulate tag data on the single-symbol level. Further, we design deinterleaving-twins decoding that can reuse any uncontrolled WiFi signals as carriers to backscatter tag data. Moreover, we present how to robustly handle high-order excitations, including different demapping rules for diverse excitations and three different bit-translation methods for decoding. To verify the effectiveness of our proposal, we prototype our solution using various FPGAs and SDRs. Comprehensive evaluations show that our solution’s maximum throughput is 3.92x and 1.97x better than FreeRider and MOXcatter. In addition, with 16QAM excitations, the decoding BERs of majority voting are around 5%, which is 10x better than subsequence matching and jaccard similarity methods. Meanwhile, the throughput of deinterleaving-level demodulation is 2x better than payload-level demodulation with 16QAM ambient traffic.