Swarun Kumar



Project PLatter: On the Feasibility of Building-scale Power Line Backscatter

We present PLatter, a building-scale backscatter system that allows ultra-low-power backscatter sensors or tags attached to walls with power lines right behind them to communicate with a reader several hundred feet away. PLatter achieves this by inducing and modulating parasitic impedance on power lines with the tag toggling between two loads in specialized patterns. We present a detailed evaluation of both the strengths and weaknesses of PLatter on a large industrial testbed with power lines up to 300 feet long, demonstrating a maximum data rate of 4 Mbps.

Citation

  • PLatter: On the Feasibility of Building-scale Power Line Backscatter, Junbo Zhang, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Artur Balanuta, Reese Grimsley, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, NSDI 2022 [PAPER]