Ultra-low-power wide range backscatter communication using cellular generated carrier

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openAccess

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2021-04-02

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Mcode

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en

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Sensors, Volume 21, issue 8

Abstract

With the popularization of Internet-of-things (IoT) and wireless communication systems, a diverse set of applications in smart cities are emerging to improve the city-life. These applications usually require a large coverage area and minimal operation and maintenance cost. To this end, the recently emerging backscatter communication (BC) is gaining interest in both industry and academia as a new communication paradigm that provides high energy efficient communications that may even work in a battery-less mode and, thus, it is well suited for smart city applications. However, the coverage of BC in urban area deployments is not available, and the feasibility of its utilization for smart city applications is not known. In this article, we present a comprehensive coverage study of a practical cellular carrier-based BC system for indoor and outdoor scenarios in a downtown area of a Helsinki city. In particular, we evaluate the coverage outage performance of different low-power and wide area technologies, i.e., long range (LoRa) backscatter, arrow band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT), and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) based BC at different frequencies of operation. To do so, we carry out a comprehensive campaign of simulations while using a sophisticated three-dimensional (3D) ray tracing (RT) tool, ITU outdoor model, and 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) indoor hotspot model. This study also covers the energy harvesting aspects of backscatter device, and it highlights the importance of future backscatter devices with high energy harvesting efficiency. The simulation results and discussion provided in this article will be helpful in understanding the coverage aspects of practical backscatter communication system in a smart city environment.

Description

Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the Academy of Finland under Project No. 311760 and Project No. 319003. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Keywords

3GPP, Backscatter communication, BLE, IoT, LoRa backscatter, Low power wide area network, LPWAN, Macrocellular, NB-IoT, Ray tracing, Simulations, Smart city

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Citation

Sheikh, M U, Xie, B, Ruttik, K, Yiğitler, H, Jäntti, R & Hämäläinen, J 2021, ' Ultra-low-power wide range backscatter communication using cellular generated carrier ', Sensors, vol. 21, no. 8, 2663 . https://doi.org/10.3390/s21082663