Multi-hop framework for battery-less devices using passive RF communication

Typical wireless multi-hop networks employ active communication where RF signal is actively generated by a sending node. In contrast, backscatter communication modulates backscattered RF signal that requires significantly less energy to operate than the active one. This paper proposes a novel, multi-hop architecture for such backscatter-based communication that is not currently present in the literature. Such a system consists of a powerful reader and small, battery-less nodes. The reader generates the original RF signal, while the passive devices backscatter this signal to communicate among themselves thus enabling multihop transmission from far-away nodes. The paper presents the generic analysis of the system capabilities and demonstrates the feasibility of such multi-hop network. Also, it studies the connectivity models in terms of k-connectivity of such network with uniformly distributed tags.