EkhoNet: high speed ultra low-power backscatter for next generation sensors

This paper argues for a clean-slate redesign of wireless sensor 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 enabling 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, channel conditions, data utility, and platform constraints to enable network-wide throughput optimizations. We instantiate this architecture on a custom FPGA-based platform connected to microphones, and show that the platform consumes 73x lower power and has 12.5x higher throughput than existing backscatter-based sensing platforms.