Making Low-Power and Long-Range Wireless Backscatter Transmitters

The past decade has seen significant increases in the deployment of wireless embedded systems. However, several challenges exist that may hinder, or even stop, this rapid growth. Among them, a significant power asymmetry among platform components is a major concern. In particular, the radio transmitters consume orders of magnitude more power than the remaining components. One promising approach to address this challenge is to design wireless transmitters based on the backscatter mechanism. This mechanism allows wireless transmissions to occur at a similar power budget to sensing and computation operations in wireless embedded systems. In this article, we discuss designing transmitters based on backscatter mechanism that achieve a large range with a low power consumption, and thus bridge the power asymmetry among the components of wireless embedded systems.