2 Passive WiFi 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