Receiver Selectivity Limits on Bistatic Backscatter Range

Backscatter communication has been a popular choice in low-power/battery-free sensor nodes development. However, the effect of RF source to receiver distance on the operating range of this communication system has not been modeled accurately. In this paper, we propose a model for a bistatic backscatter system coverage map based on the receiver selectivity, receiver sensitivity, and geometric placement of the receiver, RF source, and the tag. To verify our proposed model and simulations, we perform an experiment using a low-cost commercial BLE receiver and a custom-designed BLE backscatter tag. We also show that the receiver selectivity might depend on the interference level, and present measurement results to signify how this dependence relates the system bit error rate to the RF excitation power.