Collaborative Research: NSF-AoF: CNS Core: Small: Secure Wireless Powered Backscatter Communication for IoT

Wireless powered backscatter communication (WPBC) has emerged as a promising technology to support long-term, low-cost, and low-complexity Internet-of-Things (IoT) device communications and networking. Ensuring WPBC security is crucially important to drive its wide applications, e.g., smart cities, smart wearables, smart agriculture, smart skins, mobile payment, and supply chain.

However, resource constraints on backscatter devices and the broadcast nature of radio transmissions render the securing of WPBC challenging. Aiming to enhance the resource-constrained WPBC network security, the PIs propose novel techniques that exploit physical layer properties of WPBC and machine learning technologies to achieve efficient key agreement, anti-jamming communication, and robust device authentication with joint consideration of energy efficiency, security, and communication performance.

The proposed research is expected to greatly advance the understanding of the design tradeoff between communication and security performance goals in WPBC networks. Under-represented students will be actively involved in the proposed research activities through senior design projects, summer interns, and outreach programs. Research results will be integrated in teaching and disseminated through publications, presentations, and a project website.

A significant amount of experimental data will be collected and shared to the wireless communication and networking community.

Three major research thrusts are proposed in this project. Thrust 1 investigates efficient and scalable key generation schemes between/among wireless powered backscatter devices. Unique challenges in backscatter communication and resource constraints will be efficiently addressed by transceiver designs and optimization.

The energy efficiency of the proposed schemes is expected to outperform traditional cryptography-based schemes (e.g., Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange) by one to two orders of magnitude. Thrust 2 studies anti-jamming schemes based on multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning frameworks to effectively harvest jamming energy to achieve reliable and efficient WPBC in a multi-channel network.

The proposed scheme will turn jamming into an energy harvesting opportunity while achieving reliable communication through learning the jammed and jamming-free channels online. The proposed scheme will enjoy low computational and storage overhead. In Thrust 3, the proposed device authentication schemes are expected to achieve high authentication performance by exploiting new factors (i.e., incident signal randomization, angle of arrival estimation) at the physical layer.

They can be integrated with higher layer cryptography-based authentication schemes to enable multi-factor authentication with capabilities of detecting and tracing illegal devices. A multi-channel WPBC testbed operating in sub-6GHz bands will be developed based on the wireless identification and sensing platform (WISP) and Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) devices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.