Wi-Fi devices and address other link-layer issues including
ACKs and retransmissions.
To show the feasibility of our design, we build prototype
backscatter hardware and implement all four
802.11b bit rates on an FPGA platform. Our experimental
evaluation shows that passive Wi-Fi transmissions
can be decoded on off-the-shelf smartphones and Wi-Fi
chipsets over distances of 30–100 feet in various lineof-
sight and through-the-wall scenarios. We also design
a passive Wi-Fi IC that performs 1 Mbps and 11 Mbps
802.11b transmissions and estimate the power consumption
using Cadence and Synopsis toolkits [5, 19]. Our
results show the 1 and 11 Mbps passive Wi-Fi transmissions
consume 14.5 and 59.2 mW respectively.
Contributions. We make the following contributions:
We demonstrate for the first time that one can generate
802.11b transmissions using backscatter communication.
We present backscatter techniques that synthesize
22 MHz DSSS and CCK spread spectrum transmissions
that can be decoded on existing Wi-Fi devices.
We design a network stack for the passiveWi-Fi transmitters
to coexist with other devices in the ISM band.
Further, we present a detailed analytical model to understand
the operational range of passive Wi-Fi transmissions
in different deployment scenarios.
We build a hardware prototype on an FPGA platform
and evaluate it in various scenarios. We also design a
passive Wi-Fi IC and present its power numbers.
2 Passive Wi-Fi Design
Our design has two main actors: a plugged-in device and
passive Wi-Fi devices. The former contains power consuming
RF components including frequency synthesizer
and power amplifier and emits a single tone RF carrier. It
also performs carrier sense on behalf of the passive Wi-
Fi device and helps coordinate medium access control
across multiple passive Wi-Fi devices. The passive Wi-
Fi device backscatters the tone emitted by the plugged-in
device to synthesize 802.11b transmissions that can be
decoded on any device that has a Wi-Fi chipset.
In the rest of this section, we first provide a quick
primer for 802.11b physical layer and backscatter communication.
We then explain how the passive Wi-Fi devices
generate 802.11b packets using backscatter communication.
We then theoretically analyze the range of
our transmissions in various deployments scenarios.
2.1 Primer for 802.11b Transmissions
802.11b is a set of Wi-Fi physical layer specifications
that use spread spectrum modulation. 802.11b uses
DBPSK/DQPSK at the physical layer and achieves four
2
-40 -30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40
Amplitude2
Frequency (MHz)
Amplitude2
D f D f
fwifi - 2Df fwifi
Figure 2: Generation ofWi-Fi packets using backscatter. The plot on the left shows the 22 MHz main lobe and the
side lobes of the baseband 802.11b packet in the frequency domain. The plot on the right illustrates the backscatter
operation at the passive Wi-Fi device. The two main lobes are shifted by Df with respect to the constant tone emitted
by the plugged-in device to generate the Wi-Fi packet (in red) at fwi f i and a mirror image (in blue) at fwi f i