Bistatic architecture provides extended coverage and system reliability in scatter sensor networks

Abstract

Scatter radio is a promising enabling technology for ultra-low power consumption and low monetary cost, largescale wireless sensor networks. The two most prominent scatter radio architectures, namely the monostatic and the bistatic, are compared. Comparison metrics include bit error probability under maximum-likelihood detection for the single-user case and outage probability for the multi-user case (including tight bounds). This work concretely shows that the bistatic architecture improves coverage and system reliability. Utilizing this fact, a bistatic, digital scatter radio sensor network, perhaps the first of its kind, using frequency-shift keying (FSK) modulation and access, is implemented and demonstrated.