BeamScatter: Scalable, Deployable Long-Range backscatter communication with Beam-Steering

WiFi backscatter tags can enable direct connectivity of IoT devices with commodity WiFi hardware at low power. However, most state-of-the-art backscatter tag implementations in this area have a limited transmitter to tag range and are not suitable to be deployed in a WiFi mesh network nor take full advantage of today's WiFi networks. In this paper, we present BeamScatter, which can realize a backscatter tag-based onMIMO techniques that can work at a very long separation of 28m from an access point and enables their deployment in WiFi mesh networks. BeamScatter presents a novel technique to perform beam-steering on the MIMO tag at a very low power consumption of 88uW and achieve a peak throughput of 1Mbps. Next BeamScatter creates a novel modeling framework to decide the optimal phase setting on the tag to steer the backscattered signal towards a specific direction of interest.