Constellation Mapping for Frequency-Agile OFDM Backscatter Network

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Bingbing Wang, Wenhui Li, Fengyuan Zhu, Jiazhen Lei, Zeming Yang, Linling Zhong, Meng Jin, Xiaohua Tian

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 23 Mar 2026IEEE Trans. Netw. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: This paper presents FaB, a frequency-agile backscatter system that can optionally leverage OFDM signals on different bands as carriers for backscatter communication. Compared with existing backscatter systems that are tailored to a specific frequency band, a frequency-agile backscatter yields two critical benefits: i) it can leverage the increased availability of “free rides” across a broad range of frequency band to improve its transmission efficiency; and ii) it becomes compatible with mainstream wireless communication standards, making it applicable to heterogeneous wireless networks. Based on these two features, FaB’s circuits can be migrated to various types of backscatter communication nodes without any modification, significantly reducing design and deployment costs. To show the efficacy of our design, we implement a PCB prototype of FaB and showcase its capability of leveraging OFDM Wi-Fi and LTE signals as carrier waves. Our extensive field studies show that FaB’s multi-band modulator can produce an error vector magnitude of under -15dB in any band below 6GHz with a precision of 10mV.