Acoustic backscatter communication and power transfer for batteryless wireless sensors

Sensors for industrial and structural health monitoring are often in shielded and hard-to-reach places. Acoustic wireless power transfer (WPT) and piezoelectric backscatter enable batteryless sensors in such scenarios. Although the low efficiency of WPT demands power-conserving sensor nodes, backscatter communication, which consumes near-zero power, has not yet been combined with WPT. This study reviews the available approaches to acoustic WPT and active and passive acoustic through-metal communication. We design a batteryless and backscattering tag prototype from commercially available components. Analysis of the prototypes reveals that low-power hardware poses additional challenges for communication, i.e., unstable and inaccurate oscillators. Therefore, we implement a software-defined receiver using digital phase-locked loops (DPLLs) to mitigate the effects of oscillator instability. We show that DPLLs enable reliable backscatter communication with inaccurate clocks using simulation and real-world measurements. Our prototype achieves communication at 2 kBs⁻¹ over a distance of 3 m. Furthermore, during transmission, the prototype consumes less than 300 μW power. At the same time, over 4 mW of power is received through wireless transmission over a distance of 3 m with an efficiency of 2.8%.

Subjects

wireless power transfer

ultrasonics

backscatter communication

DDC Class

600: Technik

620: Ingenieurwissenschaften

Funding Organisations

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Publication version

publishedVersion

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Name

sensors-23-03617-v3.pdf

Size

2.13 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

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Acoustic backscatter communication and power transfer for batteryless wireless sensors