Reliable and Practical Bluetooth Backscatter With Commodity Devices

Recently backscatter communication with commodity radios has received significant attention since specialized hardware is no longer needed. The state-of-the-art BLE backscatter system, FreeRider, realizes ultra-low-power BLE backscatter communication entirely using commodity devices. It, however, suffers from several key reliability issues, including unreliable two-step modulation, productive-data dependency, and lack of interference countermeasures. To address these problems, we propose RBLE, a robust BLE backscatter system that works with an excitation BLE device and a single BLE receiver. First, it uses BLE signals with partial single tones as excitations, making single-bit modulation much more robust. Then it designs dynamic channel configuration that enables channel hopping to avoid interfered channels. Moreover, it presents BLE packet regeneration that uses adaptive encoding to further enhance reliability for various channel conditions. The prototype is implemented using TI BLE radios, iPhones, Android phones, and customized tags with FPGAs. Empirical results demonstrate that RBLE achieves more than 17x uplink goodput gains over FreeRider under indoor LoS, NLoS, and outdoor environments. We also show that RBLE can realize uplink ranges of up to 25 m for indoors and 56 m for outdoors.