Full duplex backscatter

Abstract

This paper asks the following question: could we transform the radios found in our personal gadgets into powerful multipurpose scanning devices that can detect and locate tumors, guns, buried human bodies, a la the Star Trek Tricoder? Our key insight is that if radios could measure the backscatter of their own transmissions (i.e. reflections from the environment of their transmissions), then Tricorder-style powerful object detection and localization algorithms could be realized. In this paper we focus specifically on backscatter measurement, we describe novel circuits and algorithms that can be added to existing radios to enable them to accurately and concurrently receive and disentangle their own transmissions' reflections and infer its properties.