ConcurScatter: Scalable Concurrent OFDM Backscatter Using Subcarrier Pattern Diversity

Abstract

Ambient OFDM backscatter communication has attracted considerable research efforts. Yet the prior works focus on point-to-point backscatter from a single tag, leaving behind efficient backscatter networking of multiple tags. In this paper, we design and implement ConcurScatter, the first ambient OFDM backscatter system that scales to concurrent transmission of hundreds of tags. Our key innovation is building and using the subcarrier pattern diversity to distinguish concurrent tags. This would yield linear collision states rather than exponential ones in the prior works based on the IQ domain diversity, supporting more concurrent transmission. We concrete this by designing a suit of techniques including midair frequency synthesis that forms a unique subcarrier pattern for each concurrent tag, non-integer cyclic shift that contributes to support more concurrent tags, and subcarrier pattern reconstruction that creates virtual subcarriers to enable single-symbol parallel decoding. The testbed experiment confirms that ConcurScatter supports seven more concurrent tags with similar BER and 8.4× higher throughput than the point-to-point backscatter RapidRider. The large-scale simulation shows that ConcurScatter supports 200 tags which is 40× more than the state-of-the-art concurrent OFDM backscatter FreeCollision.