Enabling Practical Backscatter Communication for On-body Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, we look at making backscatter practical for ultra-low power on-body sensors by leveraging radios on existing smartphones and wearables (e.g. WiFi and Bluetooth). The difficulty lies in the fact that in order to extract the weak backscattered signal, the system needs to deal with self-interference from the wireless carrier (WiFi or Bluetooth) without relying on built-in capability to cancel or reject the carrier interference.