Long-Range Ambient LoRa Backscatter with Parallel Decoding

Abstract

LoRa backscatter is a promising technology to achieve low-power and long-distance communication for connecting millions of devices in the Internet of Things. We present P2LoRa, the first ambient LoRa backscatter system with parallel decoding and long-range communication. The high level idea of P2LoRa is to modulate data by shifting ambient LoRa packets with a small frequency. To achieve long distance communication, we enhance the SNR of the backscatter signal by concentrating leaked energy in both the frequency domain and time domain. We propose a method to accurately reconstruct and cancel the in-band excitation signal, which is orders of magnitude higher than the backscatter signal. For parallel decoding, we propose a method to cancel inter-tag interference with very low overhead and address the signal misalignment problem due to different time of flight. We prototype the P2LoRa tag with customized low-cost hardware and implement the P2LoRa gateway on USRP. Through extensive evaluations, we show that P2LoRa achieves a long communication distance of 2.2 km with ambient LoRa, and supports 101 parallel tag transmissions.

Publication
In Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
Fan DANG
Fan DANG
Research Assistant Professor

My research interests include industrial intelligence and edge computing.