RAEN: Rate Adaptation for Effective Nodes in Backscatter Networks

A backscatter network, as a key enabling technology for interconnecting plentiful IoT sensing devices, can be applicable to a variety of interesting applications, e.g., wireless sensing and motion tracking. In these scenarios, the vital information-carrying effective nodes always suffer from an extremely low individual reading rate, which results from both unpredictable channel conditions and intense competition from other nodes. In this paper, we propose a rate-adaptation algorithm for effective nodes (RAEN), to improve the throughput of effective nodes, by allowing them to transmit exclusively and work in an appropriate data rate. RAEN works in two stages: (1) RAEN exclusively extracts effective nodes with an identification module and selection module; (2) then, RAEN leverages a trigger mechanism, combined with a random forest-based classifier, to predict the overall optimal rate. As RAEN is fully compatible with the EPC C1G2 standard, we implement the experiment through a commercial reader and multiple RFID tags. Comprehensive experiments show that RAEN improves the throughput of effective nodes by 3×, when 1/6 of the nodes are effective, compared with normal reading. What is more, the throughput of RAEN is better than traditional rate-adaptation methods.