# NetScatter: Enabling Large-Scale Backscatter Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DeepGANTT: A Scalable Deep Learning Scheduler for Backscatter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12985/) (2021)
- [Meet Me at the Arm: The Cooperative Multi-Armed Bandits Problem with Shareable Arms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10127/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first wireless protocol that scales to hundreds of concurrent transmissions from backscatter devices. Our key innovation is a distributed coding mechanism that works below the noise floor, operates on backscatter devices and can decode all the concurrent transmissions at the receiver using a single FFT operation. Our design addresses practical issues such as timing and frequency synchronization as well as the near-far problem. We deploy our design using a testbed of backscatter hardware and show that our protocol scales to concurrent transmissions from 256 devices using a bandwidth of only 500 kHz. Our results show throughput and latency improvements of 14--62x and 15--67x over existing approaches and 1--2 orders of magnitude higher transmission concurrency.