Gateway over the air: Towards pervasive internet connectivity for commodity IoT

Abstract

This paper presents GateScatter, the first backscatter-based gateway connecting commodity IoT to WiFi. The backscatter design of GateScatter is an economic option towards pervasive Internet connectivity for ever-growing IoT. The carefully designed tag optimally reshapes ZigBee IoT packets with an arbitrary payload into an 802.11b WiFi packet over the air, such that the payload can be reliably retrieved at the WiFi receiver (hence a gateway). Gate-Scatter is highly compatible - it works with a wide range of IEEE 802.15.4-compliant systems, is agnostic to upper layer proprietary protocols, and does not require any modification to the commodity IoT platforms. GateScatter is extended to BLE IoT for generality. We prototype GateScatter hardware on FPGA where the wide applicability is demonstrated through evaluations on five popular IoT devices including Samsung SmartThings sensor, Philips smart bulb, and Amazon Echo Plus. Further extensive evaluations show that GateScatter consistently achieves throughput above 200 kbps and range of over 27 m under diverse practical scenarios including a corridor, dormitory room, and under user mobility.