Enabling High-Goodput Backscatter Communication with Commodity BLE

Maoran Jiang, Yunyun Feng, Amiya Nayak, Wei Gong

Abstract: Recently, backscatter technology has attracted much interest in wireless communication due to its novel low-cost and battery-free design. Since Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was born to be low energy consumption, great efforts have been made in BLE-based backscatter systems, like FreeRider, RBLE. In this paper, we present BonusBlue, a BLE backscatter system that enables high-goodput communication with commercial BLE devices. BonusBlue tag generates BLE packets by modulating data on excitation signals and set up a data connection with BLE receiver using a state machine, thus achieving a high-goodput communication link. We present this state machine design and build a prototype of our tag using an FPGA, and evaluate its performance with BLE devices. Our evaluation shows that the backscatter tag can build a robust data connection link with commodity BLE device in the guidance of our state machine and transmit tag data on this link. Experimental results show that our backscatter system can achieve a goodput of up to 16.9 kbps.