BumbleBee: Enabling the Vision of Pervasive ZigBee Backscatter Communication

Abstract

We present BumbleBee, a novel backscatter system that creates ZigBee transmissions over productive Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) carriers. In contrast to prior content-aware or non-productive backscatter, BumbleBee overwrites tag information independently on any ambient BLE. The backscattered signal is dominated by the tag information and compliant with commodity ZigBee radios. Since BLE signals are widespread, BumbleBee enables the vision of pervasive ZigBee backscatter communication. We prototype BumbleBee using commodity BLE transmitters, an off-the-shelf FPGA, and commodity ZigBee receivers. Through extensive experiments and field studies, we show that BumbleBee works universally with ambient BLE and commodity receivers. Further, when the signal strength is -80 dBm, BumbleBee has a throughput of 218 kbps and 204 kbps in the line-of-sight (LOS) and nonline-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios, respectively. The throughput improvement is up to 3x compared with the advanced non-productive backscatter system, Interscatter [1], and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$32\mathrm{x}$</tex> over the content-aware backscatter system, FreeRider [2]. The bit error ratio (BER) is below 1% when the tag-to-receiver distance is 20 meters. As the first ambient ZigBee backscatter system that works universally with commodity transceivers, we believe BumbleBee takes a crucial step towards pervasive ZigBee backscatter communication.