An ISAC-ready Full-Duplex Backscatter Architecture for the mmWave IoT

2026-01-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of enabling long-range, high-rate, and bidirectional concurrent communication for power-constrained devices in millimeter-wave (mmWave) Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems by proposing the first mmWave full-duplex backscatter tag architecture. The design integrates a low-power regenerative amplifier (providing 30 dB gain at only 30 mW) and a high-sensitivity regenerative rectifier (with sensitivity down to −60 dBm), enabling simultaneous uplink and downlink communication and localization on a compact PCB platform. Experimental results demonstrate a downlink bit error rate (BER) of 10⁻¹ at 200 meters and an uplink BER of 10⁻² at 45 meters, achieving a 20-fold increase in communication range and a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in hardware cost compared to existing systems, thereby significantly outperforming current approaches.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Achieving long-range, high-rate, concurrent two-way mmWave communication with power-constrained IoT devices is fundamental to scaling future ubiquitous sensing systems, yet the substantial power demands and high cost of mmWave hardware have long stood in the way of practical deployment. This paper presents the first mmWave full-duplex backscatter tag architecture, charting a genuinely low-cost path toward high-performance mmWave connectivity and localization for ISAC systems. The proposed tag operates at ranges beyond 45m on the uplink and beyond 200m on the downlink, delivering 20x the reach of state-of-the-art systems while being over 100x cheaper than existing mmWave backscatter platforms. Enabling this leap is a novel low-power regenerative amplifier that provides 30 dB of gain while consuming only 30 mW, paired with a regenerative rectifier that achieves state-of-the-art sensitivity down to -60 dBm. We integrate our circuits on a compact PCB and evaluate it across diverse uplink and downlink scenarios, where it achieves an downlink BER of $10^{-1}$ at 200 meters and a uplink BER of $10^{-2}$ at 45 meters, demonstrating resilient, high-quality communication even at extended ranges.

Problem

• mmWave
• IoT
• full-duplex backscatter
• low-power communication
• ISAC

Innovation

• mmWave
• full-duplex backscatter
• ISAC
• regenerative amplifier
• low-power IoT