Leveraging Ambient LTE Traffic for Ubiquitous Passive Communication

Abstract

To support ubiquitous computing for various applications (such as smart health, smart homes, and smart cities), the communication system requires to be ubiquitously available, ultra-low-power, high throughput, and low-latency. A passive communication system such as backscatter is desirable. However, existing backscatter systems cannot achieve all of the above requirements. In this paper, we present the first LTE backscatter (LScatter) system that leverages the continuous LTE ambient traffic for ubiquitous, high throughput and low latency backscatter communication. Our design is motivated by our observation that LTE ambient traffic is continuous (v.s. bursty and intermittent WiFi/LoRa traffic), which makes LTE ambient traffic a perfect signal source of a backscatter system. Our design addresses practical issues such as time synchronization, phase modulation, as well as phase offset elimination. We extensively evaluated our design using a testbed of backscatter hardware and USRPs in multiple real-world scenarios. Results show that our LScatter's performance is consistently orders of magnitude better than WiFi backscatter in all the above scenarios. For example, LScatter's throughput is 13.63Mbps, which is 368 times higher than the latest ambient WiFi backscatter system [54]. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our system using two real-world applications.