Hybrid backscatter communication for IoT devices in remote areas

Abstract

The IoT devices placed in remote locations require a battery replacement very often, which is not a convenient option. Backscatter communication can resolve this problem, as backscatter communication is a data transmission in which an RF signal incident from the gateway is used for energy harvesting, and this energy will be employed for data transmission. In this paper, a hybrid contention-based TDMA scheme is proposed, which provides slots to devices by dividing them into groups, and then contention is employed in groups to acquire a slot; if a device is not able to transmit during harvest, then transmit (HTT) period, then it can transmit in variable sub frame and the devices which are not able to completely transmit during HTT period can reserve subframes. The proposed hybrid scheme is compared with the TDMA scheme for average transmission delay.The proposed scheme provides scalability. The difference between the average transmission delay of TDMA and the proposed hybrid scheme is from 6 to 20 s, depending on the number of devices added and when traffic is generated.

Keywords

• Backscatter communication
• IoT devices
• Energy harvesting
• TDMA
• NOMA
• CSMA