RF Information Harvesting for Medium Access in Event-driven Batteryless Sensing

We present radio-frequency (RF) information harvesting, a channel sensing technique that takes advantage of the energy in the wireless medium to detect channel activity at essentially no energy cost. RF information harvesting is essential for event-driven wireless sensing applications using battery-less devices that harvest tiny amounts of energy from impromptu events, such as operating a switch, and then transmit the event notification to a one-hop gateway. As multiple such devices may concurrently detect events, coordinating access to the channel is key. RF information harvesting allows devices to break the symmetry between concurrently-transmitting devices based on the harvested energy from the ongoing transmissions. To demonstrate the benefits of RF information harvesting, we integrate it in a tailor-made ultra lowpower hardware MAC protocol we call Radio Frequency-Distance Packet Queuing (RF-DiPaQ). We build a hardware/software prototype of RF-DiPaQ and use an established Markov framework to study its performance at scale. Comparing RF-DiPaQ against staple contention-based MAC protocols, we show that it outperforms pure Aloha and 1-CSMA by factors of 3.55 and 1.21 respectively in throughput, while it saturates at more than double the offered load compared to 1-CSMA. As traffic increases, the energy saving of RF-DiPaQ against CSMA protocols increases, consuming 36% less energy than np-CSMA at typical offered loads.