Paper about television signal backscattering using the RTL2832 as a receiver prepared for the Swedish National Computer Networking Workshop.
Ambient backscatter communication enables ultra- low power wireless transmissions and is hence attractive for networking devices which operate on harvested energy. The data to be sent is modulated on an ambient signal, such as TV signals. Tag-to-tag backscatter communication requires rather strong ambient signals to achieve acceptable error rates and range. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of a backscatter receiver on a extremely low-cost software defined radio plattform (RTL-SDR), achieving higher sensitivity than state-of-the-art backscatter tags and thus enabling wide area ambient backscatter communication from low-power tags. Our measurements show that the TV signal is strong enough in most parts of a mid-sized Swedish city for our system to operate and communicate.
Maximilian Stiefel, Elmar van Rijnswou, Carlos Pérez-Penichet, Ambuj Varshney, Christian Rohner and Thiemo Voigt