LiFi for Low-Power and Long-Range RF Backscatter

Abstract

Light bulbs have been recently explored to design Light Fidelity (LiFi) communication to battery-free tags, thus complementing Radiofrequency (RF) backscatter in the uplink. In this paper, we show that LiFi and RF backscatter are complementary and have unexplored interactions. We introduce PassiveLiFi, a battery-free system that uses LiFi to transmit RF backscatter at a meagre power budget. We address several challenges on the system design in the LiFi transmitter, the tag and the RF receiver. We design the first LiFi transmitter that implements a chirp spread spectrum (CSS) using the visible light spectrum. We use a small bank of solar cells for both communication and harvesting, and reconfigure them based on the amount of harvested energy and desired data rate. We further alleviate the low responsiveness of solar cells with a new low-power receiver design in the tag. We design and implement a novel technique for embedding multiple symbols in the RF backscatter based on delayed chirps. Experimental results with an RF carrier of 17 dBm show that we can generate RF backscatter with a range of 92.1 meters/µW consumed in the tag, which is almost double with respect to prior work.