The radio range of backscatter systems continues growing as new wireless
communication primitives are continuously invented. Nevertheless, both the bit
error rate and the packet loss rate of backscatter signals increase rapidly
with the radio range, thereby necessitating the cooperation between the access
point and the backscatter tags through a feedback loop. Unfortunately, the
low-power nature of backscatter tags limits their ability to demodulate
feedback signals from a remote access point and scales down to such
circumstances. This paper presents Saiyan, an ultra-low-power demodulator for
long-range LoRa backscatter systems. With Saiyan, a backscatter tag can
demodulate feedback signals from a remote access point with moderate power
consumption and then perform an immediate packet retransmission in the presence
of packet loss. Moreover, Saiyan enables rate adaption and channel hopping-two
PHY-layer operations that are important to channel efficiency yet unavailable
on long-range backscatter systems. We prototype Saiyan on a two-layer PCB board
and evaluate its performance in different environments. Results show that
Saiyan achieves 5 gain on the demodulation range, compared with
state-of-the-art systems. Our ASIC simulation shows that the power consumption
of Saiyan is around 93.2 uW. Code and hardware schematics can be found at:
https://github.com/ZangJac/Saiyan