Leggiero: Analog WiFi Backscatter with Payload Transparency

Abstract

Backscatter is an enabling technology for battery-free sensing in today's Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIOT). Building a backscatter-based sensing system, however, is a daunting task, due to two obstacles: the unaffordable power consumption of the microprocessor and the coexistence with the ambient carrier's traffic. In order to address the above issues, in this paper, we present Leggiero, the first-of-its-kind analog WiFi backscatter with payload transparency. Leveraging a specially designed circuit with a varactor diode, this design avoids using a microprocessor to interface between the radio and the sensor, and directly converts the analog sensor signal into the phase of RF (radio frequency) signal. By carefully designing the reference circuit on the tag and precisely locating the extra long training field (LTF) section of a WiFi packet, Leggiero embeds the analog phase value into the channel state information (CSI). A commodity WiFi receiver without hardware modification can simultaneously decode the WiFi and the sensor data. We implement Leggiero design and evaluate its performance under varied settings. The results show that the power consumption of the Leggiero tag (excluding the power of the peripheral sensor module) is 30μW at a sampling rate of 400Hz, which is 4.8× and 4× lower than the state-of-the-art WiFi backscatter schemes. The uplink throughput of Leggiero is suficient to support a variety of sensing applications, while keeping the WiFi carrier's throughput performance unaffected.