EkhoNet: High Speed Ultra Low-power Backscatter for Next Generation Sensors

This paper argues for a clean-slate redesign of wireless sen-sor systems to take advantage of the extremely low power consumption of backscatter communication and emerging ultra-low power sensor modalities. We make the case that existing sensing architectures incur substantial overhead for a variety of computational blocks between the sensor and RF front end — while these overheads were negligible on platforms where communication was expensive, they become the bottleneck on backscatter-based systems and increase power consumption while limiting throughput. We present a radically new design that is minimalist, yet efficient, and designed to operate end-to-end at tens of µWs while en-abling high-data rate backscatter at rates upwards of many hundreds of Kbps. In addition, we demonstrate a complex reader-driven MAC layer that jointly considers energy, chan-nel conditions, data utility, and platform constraints to en-able network-wide throughput optimizations. We instan-tiate this architecture on a custom FPGA-based platform connected to microphones, and show that the platform con-sumes 73 × lower power and has 12.5 × higher throughput than existing backscatter-based sensing platforms