Full-duplex Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) compatible Backscatter communication system for mobile devices

Abstract

We present the first demonstration of a monostatic full-duplex backscatter system having a carrier source co-located with a commercial Bluetooth chipset. The system permits the co-location and simultaneous operation of a commercial Bluetooth chipset with a carrier source, enabling the use of specially designed BLE-Backscatter tags to send data to the commercial Bluetooth chipset with no software modifications. This demonstration shows the potential for reusing the wireless chipsets in future full-duplex devices as readers for backscatter tags and other backscatter-based devices. Using a directional coupler-based carrier cancellation implementation, we achieve carrier suppression of 50 dB. In an over-the-air experiment using a dipole antenna with 2.1 dBi gain, we observe a read range of 3 meters with an 88% packet success rate at a carrier power of +33.9 dBm.