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1. Backscatter Communications with Passive Receivers: From Fundamentals to Applications

   Stanacevic, M.; Athalye, A.; Haas, Z.J.; Das, S.R; Djuric, P.M. (December 2020, ITU Journal)

   null (Ed.)

   The principle of backscattering has the potential to enable a full realization of the Internet of Things. This paradigm subsumes massively deployed things that have the capability to communicate directly with each other. Based on the types of excitation and receivers, we discriminate four types of backscattering systems: (i) Dedicated Exciter Active Receiver systems, (ii) Ambient Exciter Active Receiver systems, (iii) Dedicated Exciter Passive Receiver systems, and (iv) Ambient Exciter Passive Receiver systems. In this paper, we present an overview of bacskscattering systems with passive receivers which form the foundation for Backscattering Tag-to-Tag Networks (BTTNs). This is a technology that allows tiny batteryless RF tags attached to various objects to communicate directly with each other and to perform RF-based sensing of the communication link. We present an overview of recent innovations in hardware architectures for backscatter modulation, passive demodulation, and energy harvesting that overcome design challenges for passive tag-to-tag communication. We further describe the challenges in scaling up the architecture from a single link to a distributed network. We provide some examples of application scenarios enabled by BTTNs involving object-to-object communication and inter-object or human-object dynamic interactions. Finally, we discuss key challenges in present-day BTTN technology and future research directions. 

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2. Full-Duplex Receiver With Wideband, High-Power RF Self-Interference Cancellation Based on Capacitor Stacking in Switched-Capacitor Delay Lines

   https://doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2024.3351615  

   Garikapati, Sasank; Nagulu, Aravind; Kadota, Igor; Essawy, Mostafa; Chen, Tingjun; Wang, Shibo; Pande, Tanvi; Natarajan, Arun S; Zussman, Gil; Krishnaswamy, Harish (January 2024, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits)

   The self-interference (SI) channels in full-duplex (FD) radios have large nano-second-scale delay spreads, which poses a significant challenge in designing SI cancelers that can emulate the SI channel over wide bandwidths. Passive implementations of high delay lines have a prohibitively large form factor and loss when implemented on silicon, whereas active implementations suffer from noise and linearity penalties. In this work, we leverage time-interleaved multi-path switched-capacitor (SC) circuits to provide large wideband delays with a small form factor and low power (LP) consumption to implement RF and baseband (BB) cancelers in an FD receiver (RX). We utilize capacitor stacking to obtain passive voltage gain to compensate for the loss of these delay elements, thus permitting an increased number of interleaved paths and, hence, a higher delay. Furthermore, to reduce the RX noise figure (NF) penalty due to injecting the cancellation signal into the receiver, we introduce a novel low-noise trans-impedance amplifier (LNTA) architecture, which injects the cancellation signal into RX and also accomplishes finite impulse response (FIR) filter weighting and summation. The FD receiver is implemented in a standard 65-nm CMOS process and operates from 0.1 to 1 GHz. The RF/BB canceler delay cells have real-/complex-valued weighting with delays ranging 

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3. Receiver Selectivity Limits on Bistatic Backscatter Range

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RFID49298.2020.9244826  

   Katanbaf, Mohamad; Saffari, Ali; Smith, Joshua R. (September 2020, 2020 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID))

   null (Ed.)

   Backscatter communication has been a popular choice in low-power/battery-free sensor nodes development. However, the effect of RF source to receiver distance on the operating range of this communication system has not been modeled accurately. In this paper, we propose a model for a bistatic backscatter system coverage map based on the receiver selectivity, receiver sensitivity, and geometric placement of the receiver, RF source, and the tag. To verify our proposed model and simulations, we perform an experiment using a low-cost commercial BLE receiver and a custom-designed BLE backscatter tag. We also show that the receiver selectivity might depend on the interference level, and present measurement results to signify how this dependence relates the system bit error rate to the RF excitation power. 

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4. RTSense: passive RFID based temperature sensing

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1145/3384419.3430729  

   Swadhin Pradhan, Lili Qiu (November 2020, ACM SenSys)

   null (Ed.)

   Passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are attractive because they are low cost, battery-free, and easy to deploy. This technology is traditionally being used to identify tags attached to the objects. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of turning passive RFID tags into battery-free temperature sensors. The impedance of the RFID tag changes with the temperature and this change will be manifested in the reflected signal from the tag. This opens up an opportunity to realize battery-free temperature sensing using a passive RFID tag with already deployed Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) RFID reader-antenna infrastructure in supply chain management or inventory tracking. However, it is challenging to achieve high accuracy and robustness against the changes in the environment. To address these challenges, we first develop a detailed analytical model to capture the impact of temperature change on the tag impedance and the resulting phase of the reflected signal. We then build a system that uses a pair of tags, which respond differently to the temperature change to cancel out other environmental impacts. Using extensive evaluation, we show our model is accurate and our system can estimate the temperature within a 2.9 degree centigrade median error and support a normal read range of 3.5 m in an environment-independent manner. 

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5. TagFi: Locating Ultra-Low Power WiFi Tags Using Unmodified WiFi Infrastructure

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3448082  

   Soltanaghaei, Elahe; Dongare, Adwait; Prabhakara, Akarsh; Kumar, Swarun; Rowe, Anthony; Whitehouse, Kamin (March 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies)

   Tag localization is crucial for many context-aware and automation applications in smart homes, retail stores, or warehouses. While custom localization technologies (e.g RFID) have the potential to support low-cost battery-free tag tracking, the cost and complexity of commissioning a space with beacons or readers has stifled adoption. In this paper, we explore how WiFi backscatter localization can be realized using the existing WiFi infrastructure already deployed for data applications. We present a new approach that leverages existing WiFi infrastructure to enable extremely low-power and accurate tag localization relative to a single scanning device. First, we adopt an ultra-low power tag design in which the tag blindly modulates ongoing WiFi packets using On-Off Keying (OOK). Then, we utilize the underlying physical properties of multipath propagation to detect the passive wireless reflection from the tag in the presence of rich multipath propagations. Finally, we localize the tag from a single receiver by forming a triangle between the tag reflection and the LoS path between the two WiFi transceivers. We implement TagFi using a customized backscatter tag and off-the-shelf WiFi chipsets. Our empirical results in a cluttered office building demonstrate that TagFi achieves a median localization accuracy of 0.2m up to 8 meters range. 

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