CRC-Based Reliable WiFi Backscatter Communiation for Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management aims to achieve both efficiency and low cost. Backscatter technology provides a low-energy consumption approach for critical links in the supply chain, such as warehouse management and cargo identification. Traditional backscatter systems achieve tag data transmission through dedicated hardware or controlled transmission sources. An additional access point (AP) can be used to ensure that the original data are always known in tag data decoding. These requirements increase the deployment costs and are not suitable for large-scale applications. To address these challenges, we introduce CRCScatter, a backscatter system based on a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) reverse algorithm, with an uncontrolled source and a single-AP receiver. The CRCScatter decoder at the receiver uses the constraints within 802.11b WiFi packets to recover the original packet and decode tag data from the backscatter packet. Our Matlab simulation results show that CRCScatter is effective in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, and its average decoding time is independent of the length of tag data. By appending redundant bits in tag data, the decoding accuracy of CRCScatter can be improved. In summary, CRCScatter presents a backscatter communication mode based on ambient WiFi signals with fewer hardware requirements and low deployment costs. Furthermore, the decoding idea of calculating unknown data based on the packet constraints has the potential to expand to different types of excitation packages.