OmniScatter Aims to Offer Simultaneous Communication to "Tens of Millions" of IoT Nodes
Tested to over 1,000 devices in a radio-poor environment so far, OmniScatter could offer a solution to the growing needs of the IoT.
A team of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), George Mason University, and Arizona State University has come up with a system they say could allow thousands or even millions of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes to communicate simultaneously: OmniScatter.
OmniScatter, the researchers explain, is based on millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology and designed to compete with radio-frequency ID (RFID) tag systems — but goes beyond existing mmWave backscatter communication systems by avoiding the problem of interference and signal loss in complex environments filled with radio obstacles and reflectors. The solution: commodity frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar.
Developing a new method for signal processing capable of separating backscatter signals from ambient noise while still being able to benefit from the coding gain of the FMCW radar, the team's receiver boosts sensitivity a claimed 100,000 times — while also allowing targeted devices to be assigned separate channels according to their physical locations relative to the receiver.
"The performance is theoretically comparable to the popular commodity RFID EPC Gen2 (900MHz), and is empirically validated via evaluations under various practical settings with abundant ambient reflections and blockages," the team explains, "[including] an office where a tag is locked in a wooden closet 6m away, as well in libraries and retail stores where a tag is placed across two rows of metal shelves."
"MmWave backscatter is the technology we've dreamt of," says Song Min Kim, professor of electrical engineering and team lead, of the work. "The mass scalability and ultra-low power at which it can operate IoT devices is unmatched by any existing technology. We look forward to this system being actively utilized to enable the wide availability of IoT in the hyper-connected generation to come."
The team's work has been published in the Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Application, and Services (MobiSys '22) under closed-access terms.