Mighty: Towards Long-Range and High-Throughput Backscatter for Drones

While <i>small</i> drone video streaming systems create unprecedented video content, they also place a power burden exceeding 20% on the drone's battery, limiting flight endurance. We present <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sf Mighty}$</tex-math></inline-formula>, a hardware-software solution to minimize the power consumption of a drone's video streaming system by offloading power overheads associated with both video compression and transmission to a ground controller. <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sf Mighty}$</tex-math></inline-formula> innovates a high performance co-design among: <b>(1)</b> a ring oscillator-based, ultra-low power backscatter radio; <b>(2)</b> a spectrally-efficient, non-linear, low-power physical layer modulation and multi-chain radio architecture; and <b>(3)</b> a lightweight video compression codec-bypassing software design. Our co-design exploits synergies among these components, resulting in joint throughput and range performance that pushes the known envelope. We prototype <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sf Mighty}$</tex-math></inline-formula> on PCB board and conduct extensive field studies both indoors and outdoors. The power efficiency of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sf Mighty}$</tex-math></inline-formula> is about 16.6 nJ/bit. A head-to-head comparison with a <i>DJI Mini2</i> drone's default video streaming system shows that <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\sf Mighty}$</tex-math></inline-formula> achieves similar throughput at a drone-to-controller distance of up to 150 meters, with 34–55× improvement of power efficiency than WiFi-based video streaming solutions.