HitchHike

TLDR

HitchHike is a low‑power backscatter system that can be deployed entirely using commodity WiFi infrastructure. HitchHike works by reflecting existing 802.11b transmissions from a commodity WiFi transmitter, with the backscattered signals decoded as standard WiFi packets by a commodity 802.11b receiver, enabled by a novel codeword‑translation technique that maps the original 802.11b codeword to another valid codeword. Experimentally, HitchHike achieves uplink throughputs of up to 300 Kbps at 34 m and about 200 Kbps at 54 m, demonstrating that any 802.11b receiver can decode the backscattered packet and enabling widespread deployment of low‑power backscatter communication with commodity WiFi infrastructure.

Abstract

We present HitchHike, a low power backscatter system that can be deployed entirely using commodity WiFi infrastructure. With HitchHike, a low power tag reflects existing 802.11b transmissions from a commodity WiFi transmitter, and the backscattered signals can then be decoded as a standard WiFi packet by a commodity 802.11b receiver. Hitch-Hike's key invention is a novel technique called codeword translation, which allows a backscatter tag to embed its information on standard 802.11b packets by just translating the original transmitted 802.11b codeword to another valid 802.11b codeword. This allows any 802.11b receiver to decode the backscattered packet, thus opening the doors for widespread deployment of low-power backscatter communication using widely available WiFi infrastructure. We show experimentally that HitchHike can achieve an uplink throughput of up to 300Kbps at ranges of up to 34m and ranges of up to 54m where it achieves a throughput of around 200Kbps.