Leakyscatter: Scaling Wireless Backscatter Above 100 GHz

Abstract

The past decade has seen rapid innovations in the design and deployment of low-power wireless communication mechanisms. Among them, the backscatter technique has been shown to be promising as it reduces the required power budget by orders of magnitude. However, most existing backscatter architectures operate in the sub-6 GHz regimes with a few recent examples in the lower mmWave bands. Meanwhile, despite the fact that power consumption increases radically above 100 GHz, the spectral regime has gained a lot of attention due to its abundant available bandwidth for 6G and beyond. In this article, we discuss a first-of-its-kind architecture that allows ultra-wideband directional data backscattering above 100 GHz regime while drawing near-zero power from the mobile device.