Dances with Blues: Harnessing Multi-Frequency Carriers for Commodity Bluetooth Backscatter

Abstract

We present DanBlue, a commodity Bluetooth backscatter system that can take multi-frequency signals as excitations. Unlike all prior systems, DanBlue leverages ambient Bluetooth signals of various frequencies to backscatter in the standard Bluetooth-hopping way. To do so, we first introduce an edge proxy to identify uncontrolled ambient Bluetooth signals. Then, we design a wideband channel hopping to enable fast frequency shifts for low-power tags, empowering backscatter hopping much like active Bluetooth hopping. We prototype the DanBlue tag using off-the-shelf FPGAs and the DanBlue edge with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) chips. Through comprehensive field studies, we show that DanBlue supports hopping from any-frequency Bluetooth excitations to any-frequency Bluetooth channels. Furthermore, the accuracy of frequency identification is as high as 99% with less than 7.1 ms latency. For the first time, we demonstrate DanBlue can emulate the Bluetooth protocol stack and seamlessly build connectivity with multiple active Bluetooth radios. We believe DanBlue is taking a crucial step forward on fully functioning battery-free Bluetooth.