Hitchhike : Enabling Low Power IoT on WiFi networks

RF signal generation is expensive and takes a lot of power. Hitchhike tackles this problem by recycling the ambient RF signals to embed the data from an IoT device.

Hitchhike enables co-existence of IoT devices along with the user traffic on a Wifi network. It uses a novel technique called “Codeword translation” to embed data onto an existing wifi packet.

Hitchhike’s hardware prototype consumes ~30uW of power. At this level of power consumption makes, an AA battery can last upto 15 years. The large shelf life of the tag makes it ideal for vast deployment of sensors in agricultural fields for moisture and temperature monitoring.

We have developed a novel hierarchical wake-up receiver for backscatter tags to synchronize with incident signals. Traditional backscatter tags suffer from loss of synchronization resulting in lot of bit errors and limit the tag placement close to the transmitter. Here we demonstrate a wake-up receiver to enable synchronization at the tag at a very low power and increase the tag’s working range.