Metasurface-assisted massive backscatter wireless communication with commodity Wi-Fi signals

Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 3926 - 10
Main Authors: Zhao, Hanting, Shuang, Ya, Wei, Menglin, Cui, Tie Jun, Hougne, Philipp del, Li, Lianlin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 06.08.2020
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio
Subjects:
639/166/987
639/624/1075/187
639/766/930
Apertures
Backscattering
Commodities
Communications systems
Degrees of freedom
Energy consumption
Engineering Sciences
High speed
Humanities and Social Sciences
Information processing
Information transfer
Metasurfaces
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Wave propagation
Wireless communications
antenna
commodity
backscatter
velocity
communication
article
wave phenomena
wireless communication
ISSN:2041-1723, 2041-1723
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand, modulate an antenna’s impedance to encode information into already existing waves but suffer from low data rates and a lack of information security. Here, we introduce the concept of massive backscatter communication which modulates the propagation environment of stray ambient waves with a programmable metasurface. The metasurface’s large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom enable unprecedented wave control and thereby secure and high-speed information transfer. Our prototype leveraging existing commodity 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals achieves data rates on the order of hundreds of Kbps. Our technique is applicable to all types of wave phenomena and provides a fundamentally new perspective on the role of metasurfaces in future wireless communication. Leveraging the large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom offered by a programmable metasurface, the authors modulate the propagation environment of existing background commodity Wi-Fi signals to implement a secure and high-speed massive-backscatter communication link.
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ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-17808-y