High-Throughput and Robust Rate Adaptation for Backscatter Networks

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 28; no. 5; pp. 2120 - 2131
• Main Authors: Chen, Si, Gong, Wei, Zhao, Jia, Liu, Jiangchuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation; Algorithms; Backscatter; backscatter network; Backscattering; Countermeasures; Downlink; Downlinking; High-throughput; Interference; Mapping; Microphones; Military technology; Networks; Protocols; Radio frequency identification; Radio waves; Radiofrequency identification; rate adaptation; RFID; Robustness; Temperature sensors; Throughput; Uplink; Wave propagation
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2020.3002876

Recently backscatter networks have received booming interest because, they offer a battery-free communication paradigm using propagation radio waves as opposed to active radios in traditional sensor networks while providing comparable sensing functionalities, ranging from light and temperature sensors to recent microphones and cameras. While sensing data on backscatter nodes has been seen on a clear path to increasing in both volume and variety, backscatter communication is not well prepared and optimized for transferring such continuous and high-volume data. To bridge this gap, we propose a high-throughput rate adaptation scheme for backscatter networks by exploring the unique characteristics of backscatter links and the design space of the ISO 18000-6C (C1G2) protocol. Our key insight is that while prior work has left the downlink unattended, we observe that the quality of downlink is affected significantly by multipath fading and thus can degrade the uplink and overall throughput considerably. Therefore, we introduce a novel rate mapping algorithm that chooses the best rate for both the downlink and uplink. Also, we design an efficient channel estimation method fully compatible with the C1G2 protocol and a reliable probing trigger, substantially saving probing overhead. To combat interference, we further design an interference detector using clusters and lightweight countermeasures to make rate adaptation more robust. Our scheme is prototyped using commercial RFID readers and tags. The results show that we can achieve up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">2.6\times </tex-math></inline-formula> throughput gain over state-of-the-art approaches across various mobility, channel, network-size, and interference conditions.