Enabling Multi-Channel Backscatter Communication for Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

Backscatter offers a novel low-cost and low-energy solution for tags to communicate with existing wireless devices. The latest Bluetooth standards (i.e., Bluetooth 4. x and Bluetooth 5) use the Bluetooth Low Energy technology, which is the mainstream of the current Bluetooth market. In this paper, we present multi-channel backscatter with BLE, a BLE backscatter communication system that achieves compatibility with standard BLE devices. Tag information in backscatter communication can be directly obtained from backscatter packets with a single BLE receiver. We present the first multichannel backscatter tag design and build a prototype of our tag using an FPGA and evaluate it with BLE devices. Our evaluation shows that the tag can backscatter BLE signals in a channel-hopping manner, which can be decoded by standard BLE devices. Results demonstrate that our backscatter system can achieve a goodput of up to 2.8 kbps.