Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proliferation of connected and embedded devices has played a critical role in the development of the next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) and, consequently, the diffusion of low power devices. The sustainability of such networks entails energy-aware devices that are capable of self-sustainable operations by harvesting and recycling energy from various sources. Accordingly, backscatter communication (BackCom), in which a backscatter transmitter sends data to a destination by backscattering ambient signals, e.g., Wi-Fi signals, has recently emerged as a promising key technology for the post-5G era. Due to its low power consumption, BackCom is envisioned as a strong candidate for the generation of battery-free IoT, massive machine-type communication, and device-to-device communications. Nonetheless, BackCom systems still suffer from several drawbacks, including low data rate, short-range communications, and dependence on the dynamics of ambient signals. In this research, we envisage the integration of long range (LoRa), which is one of the prominent low power wide area networks (LPWAN) technologies, wireless-powered networks (WPN), and BackCom in a single network as a new paradigm for addressing some of the challenges above. However, these technologies are not optimized and/or designed for large-scale wireless networks and a massive number of IoT devices. Also, such systems are different from human-centric communications, with diverse and unique traffic characteristics as well as Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, which require the development of efficient physical (PHY)-layer and media access control (MAC) schemes to prevent access congestions. The proposed research will realize the vision of battery-free IoT devices and provides non-incremental advances in backscatter communications and RF energy harvesting. This will be achieved by designing physical/MAC protocols that can support a large number of IoT devices with distinct QoS requirements, smart power management schemes, and ultra-low power transceiver architectures. This novel research will be highly beneficial to those in the scientific community, industry, and standardization bodies who are at the cutting edge of wireless systems, and IoT. Most importantly, the proposed research will train highly qualified personnel, who will pioneer rather than trail international initiatives in the future of IoT.