Conductive Plastic, Wi-Fi Backscatter Yield Zero-Power Wireless Sensor Connectivity

http://www.powerelectronics.com/alt...m=email&elq2=5174482af86949929143e93698c7e891

Clever!

 

Interesting concept. I suspect it will face significant challenges in the wild when the Wi-Fi node has to distinguish the change in perceived backscatter from all of the normal changes in backscatter patterns that will be going on at the same time.

 

Using changes in backscatter patterns or ambient RF for sensing is pretty old tech (The 'Great Seal' bug). It was marginally useful in a environment with limited RF background noise. A lot of marketing “hype” here.

 

Conductive Plastic, Wi-Fi Backscatter Yield Zero-Power Wireless Sensor Connectivity

http://www.powerelectronics.com/alt...m=email&elq2=5174482af86949929143e93698c7e891

Clever!

Wow, that is clever and I can see this being a big deal. They’ve ‘solved’ one of the big problems in IoT.

 

Using changes in backscatter patterns or ambient RF for sensing is pretty old tech (The 'Great Seal' bug). It was marginally useful in a environment with limited RF background noise. A lot of marketing “hype” here.

There's always a lot of hype with these kinds of announcements, so the claims definitely need to be taken with a big grain of salt. None-the-less, applying the concepts to 3D-printed structures is pretty interesting, if not necessarily Earth-shatteringly original. It will be interesting to see how the tech makes out in a real environment, particularly when there are several such widgets in range of the receiving node.

 

There's always a lot of hype with these kinds of announcements, so the claims definitely need to be taken with a big grain of salt. None-the-less, applying the concepts to 3D-printed structures is pretty interesting, if not necessarily Earth-shatteringly original. It will be interesting to see how the tech makes out in a real environment, particularly when there are several such widgets in range of the receiving node.

https://simson.net/ref/1948/stockman.pdf
The most obvious problem is the S/N ratio of detectable signals and low transmission rates with a dynamically changing low power Wi-Fi RF source. A good background theory article.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04804.pdf

D. Security and Jamming Issues
Due to the simple coding and modulation schemes adopted, backscatter communications are vulnerable to security attacks such as eavesdropping and jamming. The passive nature of backscatter communications making it challenging to secure backscatter secrecy. On one hand, any attacker that uses active RF transmitters can be more powerful to impair the modulated backscatter [173]. On the other hand, attacks on the signals sources, e.g., denial-of-service attack, can also jeopardize backscatter communications. Moreover, the resource constraints in backscatter transceivers make it impractical or even impossible to implement typical security solutions such as encryption and digital signature. Some existing research efforts mainly focus on physical-layer security approaches to protect secrecy. For example, references [174], [175] utilize artificial noise injection with the help of the reader to safeguard backscatter communications in RFID systems. However, this approach cannot be directly adopted in ABCSs as there are not dedicated readers. It is imperative to design simple, yet effective solutions to enable secure ambient backscatter communications.