On-Off Noise Power Communication

Abstract

We design and build a protocol called on-off noise power communication (ONPC), which modifies the software in commodity packet radios to allow communication, independent of their standard protocol, at a very slow rate at long range. To achieve this long range, we use the transmitter as an RF power source that can be on or off if it does or does not send a packet, respectively, and a receiver that repeatedly measures the noise and interference power level. We use spread spectrum techniques on top of the basic on/off mechanism to overcome the interference caused by other devices' channel access to provide long ranges at a much lower data rate. We implement the protocol on top of commodity WiFi hardware. We discuss our design and how we overcome key challenges such as non-stationary interference, carrier sensing and hardware timing delays. We test ONPC in several situations to show that it achieves significantly longer range than standard WiFi.