Channel coding for increased range bistatic backscatter radio: Experimental results

Abstract

This work offers concrete, low-complexity (small codeword length) channel coding for the bistatic scatter radio channel, complementing the uncoded setup of recent work. The theoretical design is experimentally validated with a commodity software-defined radio (SDR) reader; tag-to-reader ranges up to 134 meters are demonstrated with 13 dBm emitter power, while bit error rate (BER) is reduced or range is increased, on the order of 10 additional meters (or more) compared to the uncoded case, with linear encoding at the tag/sensor and simple decoding at the reader. Even though designing low-complexity channel coding schemes is a challenging problem, this work offers a concrete solution that could accelerate the adoption of scatter radio for large-scale wireless sensor networks, i.e. backscatter sensor networks.