Signal Strength Balanced Scheduling for Secure Ambient Backscatter Networks

Abstract

With the development of wireless network technology, backscatter networks that effectively connect IoT devices are attracting attention. The tags used in the backscatter network have a simple structure that leads to low-power and low-cost characteristics. However, due to these features, traditional security methods requiring complex operations cannot be applied to backscatter tags, making them especially vulnerable to simple attacks such as eavesdropping. In this paper, we propose the signal strength balanced scheduling scheme to enhance the security of ambient backscatter networks. With the proposed scheduling method, we intentionally generate the collision signal and utilize it for communications between the reader and tags. We also present a decoding algorithm for interpreting the collision signal successfully. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves security enhancement and that the decoding algorithm interprets the collision signal with high accuracy.