Mobile Underwater Backscatter Networking
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3718958.3750507.pdf
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1.44 MB
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Adobe PDF
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f966f046a93d35591e6e4d0f8f5c57d5
Author(s)
Wang, Purui
Afzal, Sayed Saad
Adib, Fadel
Date Issued
August 27, 2025
Publisher
ACM|ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference
Citation
Purui Wang, Sayed Saad Afzal, and Fadel Adib. 2025. Mobile Underwater Backscatter Networking. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1025–1039.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Underwater backscatter is a promising technology for ultra-low-power underwater networking, but existing systems break down in mobile scenarios. This paper presents EchoRider, the first system to enable reliable underwater backscatter networking under mobility.
EchoRider introduces three key components. First, it incorporates a robust and energy-efficient downlink architecture that uses chirp-modulated transmissions at the reader and a sub-Nyquist chirp decoder on backscatter nodes—bringing the resilience of LoRa-style signaling to underwater backscatter while remaining ultra-low-power. Second, it introduces a NACK-based full-duplex retransmission protocol, enabling efficient, reliable packet delivery. Third, it implements a Doppler-resilient uplink decoding pipeline that includes adaptive equalization, polar coding, and dynamic retraining to combat channel variation.
We built a full EchoRider prototype and evaluated it across over 1,200 real-world mobile experiments. EchoRider improves bit error rate by over 125× compared to a state-of-the-art baseline and maintains underwater goodput of 0.8 kbps at speeds up to 2.91 knots. In contrast, the baseline fails at speeds as low as 0.17 knots. Finally, we demonstrate EchoRider in end-to-end deployments involving mobile drones and sensor nodes, showing its effectiveness in practical underwater networked applications.
Description
SIGCOMM ’25, Coimbra, Portugal
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3718958.3750507
