RapidRider: Efficient WiFi Backscatter with Uncontrolled Ambient Signals

This paper presents RapidRider, the first WiFi backscatter system that takes uncontrolled OFDM WiFi signals, e.g., 802.11a/g/n, as excitations and efficiently embeds tag data at the single-symbol rate. Such design brings us closer to the dream of pervasive backscatter communication since uncontrolled WiFi signals are everywhere. Specifically, we show that RapidRider can demodulate tag data for each OFDM symbol while previous systems rely on multi-symbol demodulation. Further, we design deinterleaving-twins decoding that enables RapidRider to use any uncontrolled WiFi signals as carriers. We prototype RapidRider using FPGAs, commodity radios, and USRPs. Comprehensive evaluations show that RapidRider's maximum throughput is 3.92x and 1.97x better than FreeRider and MOXcatter. To accommodate cases where there is only one receiver available, we design RapidRider+ that can take productive data and tag data on the same packet. Results demonstrate that it can achieve an aggregated goodput of productive and tag data around 1 Mbps on average.