Development of a Wireless IoT Gateway Using Backscatter Technology
Modulating Zigbee/BLE signals into Wi-Fi signals
Also confirmed as a potential integrated IoT gateway


A domestic research team has developed an IoT gateway that can generate wireless signals without consuming power, thus reducing installation space constraints.

A joint research team, including Professors Sungmin Kim and Yong Lee of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at KAIST, and Ph.D. candidate Jinhwan Jeong, and Professor Jihoon Ryu of the Department of Computer Science at the State University of New York, Korea, announced on the 13th that they had succeeded in developing a wireless IoT gateway using backscattering technology.

Backscatter technology is a technology that transmits information by reflecting radiated signals existing in the air rather than directly generating wireless signals from the device, and does not consume power to generate wireless signals.

For IoT devices to connect to the Internet, an IoT gateway equipped with multiple wireless transmitters and receivers is required. However, due to the high power consumption generated by various wireless transmitters and receivers, IoT gateways require wired power supplies, and their free installation is inevitably limited.

To address these issues, the research team developed a technology that utilizes backscattering technology to reflect wireless signals conforming to the ZigBee or BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) communication standards primarily used by IoT devices in an optimal pattern and modulate them into Wi-Fi signals. Using this technology, they created a wireless IoT gateway that connects IoT devices to Wi-Fi devices, providing internet connectivity.

The wireless IoT gateway technology developed by the research team utilizes backscattering technology to harvest energy, enabling zero power consumption and significantly reducing installation and maintenance costs. Furthermore, the inherent nature of backscattering allows for physical modulation of wireless signals by reflecting them into the air, making it universally applicable to all IoT devices using the same communication standard.

The research team confirmed that Zigbee and BLE signals, which are low-power communication standards, were modulated into Wi-Fi signals through a wireless IoT gateway and received on a commercial laptop. In addition, the possibility of an integrated IoT gateway was confirmed by experimentally proving that commercial smart home devices sold by various manufacturers are interconnected to Wi-Fi devices through an IoT gateway.

“By utilizing backscattering technology, we can connect IoT devices to the Internet via Wi-Fi at a very low cost,” said first author Jin-Hwan Jeong, a researcher. “Through this research, we have confirmed that the limitations of existing expensive and power-hungry IoT gateways can be overcome with a wireless IoT gateway.”

Meanwhile, this study was presented under the title 'Gateway over the air: Towards Pervasive Internet Connectivity for Commodity IoT' at 'ACM MobiSys 2020', the most prestigious academic conference in the field of mobile computing held in Toronto, Canada in June, and was conducted with the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency.