Design of a Wirelessly Powered S-Band Backscatter Edge Sensing Platform

This paper presents a prototype battery-free wireless edge sensor capable of consistent operation and backscatter communication in the S-band. The prototype can gather power from an S-band wireless beacon using a Dickson charge pumpbased harvester. The energy captured by the harvester is stored in a capacitor, which is then used to power a microcontroller and an environmental sensor. The data is relayed from the sensing platform to a receiver by toggling an RF switch, which momentarily reflects the incident signal that provides energy to it. This creates a so-called “backscatter” data transmission. In testing, the sensing platform, energized with a -6dBm carrier, was able to poll data every 100ms and relay it to a receiver using backscatter transmissions.