Commodity-level BLE backscatter

Abstract

The communication reliability of state-of-the-art Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) backscatter systems is fundamentally limited by their modulation schemes because the Binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) modulation of the tag does not exactly match commodity BLE receivers designed for Gauss Frequency Shift Keying (GFSK) modulated signals with high bandwidth efficiency. Gaussian pulse shaping is a missing piece in state-of-the-art BLE backscatter systems. Inspired by active BLE and applying calculus, we present IBLE, a BLE backscatter communication system that achieves full compatibility with commodity BLE devices. IBLE leverages the fact that phase shift is the integral of frequency over time to build a reliable physical layer for BLE backscatter. IBLE uses instantaneous phase shift (IPS) modulation, GFSK modulation, and optional FEC coding to improve the reliability of BLE backscatter communication to the commodity level. We prototype IBLE using various commodity BLE devices and a customized tag with FPGA. Empirical results demonstrate that IBLE achieves PERs of 0.04% and 0.68% when the uplink distances are 2 m and 14 m respectively, which are 280x and 70x lower than the PERs of the state-of-the-art system RBLE. On the premise of meeting the BER requirements of the BLE specification, the uplink range of IBLE is 20 m. Since BLE devices are everywhere, IBLE is readily deployable in our everyday IoT applications.