Drone Relays for Battery-Free Networks
Name
drone_relays_for_battery-free_networks.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
20.74 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2fc8f8faf71ae55caf819c944fcfedd1
Author(s)
Ma, Yunfei
Selby, Nicholas
Adib, Fadel
Date Issued
August 2017
Journal
2017 Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Ma, Yunfei, Nicholas Selby, and Fadel Adib. "Drone Relays for Battery-Free Networks." Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, August 2017, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Association for Computing Machinery, 2017
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Battery-free sensors, such as RFIDs, are annually attached to billions of items including pharmaceutical drugs, clothes, and manufacturing parts. The fundamental challenge with battery-free sensors is that they are only reliable at short distances of tens of centimeters to few meters. As a result, today's systems for communicating with and localizing battery-free sensors are crippled by the limited range. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents RFly, a system that leverages drones as relays for battery-free networks. RFly delivers two key innovations. It introduces the first full-duplex relay for battery-free networks. The relay can seamlessly integrate with a deployed RFID infrastructure, and it preserves phase and timing characteristics of the forwarded packets. RFly also develops the first RF-localization algorithm that can operate through a mobile relay. We built a hardware prototype of RFly's relay into a custom PCB circuit and mounted it on a Parrot Bebop drone. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that RFly enables communication with commercial RFIDs at over 50 m. Moreover, its through-relay localization algorithm has a median accuracy of 19 centimeters. These results demonstrate that RFly provides powerful primitives for communication and localization in battery-free networks. Keywords: Drones; RFID; Relay; Full-Duplex; Localization; Battery-free; SAR
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3098822.3098847
