Timespan-based Backscatter Using a Single COTS Receiver

This paper presents TiScatter, a timespan-based WiFi backscatter system that provides high-throughput communication with a single COTS receiver used. It outperforms the prior works that tradeoff between considerable data rate and practical deployment. To improve the data rate, TiScatter introduces a symbol-level times-pan modulation method that encodes tag data into the timespan between two modulated WiFi codewords in two successive WiFi packets. For decoding, TiScatter for the first time employs the injective feature between the checksum and the modulated codeword positions, which enables the demodulation of both the tag and original WiFi data using only one COTS receiver. This makes TiScatter more practical. Furthermore, we design TiScatter+ that shows these advantages while providing an even higher throughput under 802.11b excitations. We prototype our design, and comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TiScatter shows a throughput over 100× higher than prior single-receiver backscatter systems like FS-Backscatter. It even has a better BER and throughput than the prior double-receiver backscatter systems like MOXcatter. Specifically, TiScatter provides 1) 2× higher peak throughput than MOXcatter and 2) an order of magnitude lower BER than MOXcatter with the presence of substantial interferences. In addition, TiScatter+ can deliver a throughput 3× higher than TiScatter under 802.11b ambient excitations. Our evaluation also confirms that TiScatter is generic and applicable to excitations under diverse WiFi standards (e.g., 802.11b/g/n).