Assessing Backscatter Link Quality Through Canopy

Backscatter communication is well-suited for agriculture, forest sensing, and environmental monitoring due to its low power and maintenance requirements. It can support a range of applications, including reading sensor values such as soil moisture or nutrient levels, monitoring plant health, tracking animal movements, or detecting forest fires. In these settings, sensors and backscatter nodes are often placed deep in the forest or under the plant canopy, while the reader is positioned on a mobile node such as a drone flying above the canopy. Consequently, signal attenuation caused by canopy blockage remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the feasibility of using backscatter communication in such environments and argues that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is not the most reliable metric for evaluating link quality. Instead, we propose a new metric, called template correlation, which provides a more accurate assessment in low-SNR conditions. Our findings demonstrate that backscatter communication, with its low power consumption and minimalist hardware design at the tags, is effective for environmental monitoring, even in the presence of canopy attenuators like grasses or crops.