Bidirectional Bluetooth Backscatter with Edges

Bidirectional links are widely adopted in many active radios to provide efficient data exchanges, e.g., WiFi and Bluetooth. However, they are underexplored for general-purpose backscatter communications. The downlinks of state-of-the-art Bluetooth backscatter systems are based on packet length modulation, which is inefficient and unreliable. In this paper, we propose BiBlue, a bidirectional Bluetooth backscatter system that uses an edge server to enable fast and reliable downlinks. Specifically, our edge server acts like a bridge that can translate commercial Bluetooth signals to Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) signals. In addition, we design a reliable edge-to-tag link that adaptively decodes ASK signal under variance. Finally, we propose a low-power uplink design that enables connection-based bidirectional communication with commodity devices. We prototype BiBlue using FPGA and Software Defined Radio (SDR). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BiBlue achieves more than 62x downlink throughput gains over FreeRider and meanwhile supports an 80 cm communication range of edge-to-tag with BER at around 1%.