Carrier scheduling in IoT networks with interoperable battery-free backscatter tags

New battery-free backscatter tags that integrate with unmodified standard IoT devices can extend the latter's sensing capabilities in a scalable and cost effective way. Existing IoT nodes can provide the unmodulated carrier needed by the new nodes, avoiding the need for additional infrastructure. This, however, puts extra energetic demands on constrained IoT nodes while increasing interference and contention in the network. We use a slotted MAC protocol to guarantee synchronization between transmitters, receivers and carrier generators. We then express the slot allocation problem as a Constraint Optimization Problem (COP) that parallelizes interrogations to battery-free tags when they do not collide with each other and reuses carriers for multiple tags looking to minimize the total time and the number of carrier generators needed to interrogate a set of tags. In networks with sufficient battery-free nodes we obtain a 25% reduction in the number of necessary carriers and a 50% decrease in interrogation time in most cases; leading to significant energy savings, reduced collisions and improved latency.