BLISP: Enhancing Backscatter Radio with Active Radio for Computational RFIDs

Abstract: We demonstrate the world's first hybrid radio platform which combines the strengths of active radio (long range and robustness to interference) and Computational RFIDs (low power consumption). We evaluate the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), an EPC C1G2 standard-based, Computational RFID backscatter radio, against Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and show (theoretically and experimentally) that WISP in high channel attenuation conditions is less energy efficient per received byte than BLE. Exploiting this observation we design a simple switching mechanisms that backs off to BLE when radio conditions for WISP are unfavorable. By a set of laboratory experiments, we show that our proposed hybrid active/backscatter radio obtains higher goodput than WISP and lower energy consumption than BLE as stand-alone platforms, especially when WISP is in range of an RFID interrogator for the majority of the time. Simultaneously, our proposed platform is as energy efficient as BLE when user is mostly out of RFID interrogator range.