Enhancing the Sustainability of Acoustic Backscatter Communication with Multi-Source Energy Harvesting

Backscatter Communication (BackCom) has opened up various novel joint sensing and communication applications in the Internet of things (IoT) domain. In particular, the IoT devices in water bodies have seen a recent paradigm shift toward more sustainability with the advent of Acoustic Backscatter Communication (A-BackCom). However, despite the low-power budget of A-BackCom, it only relies on harvesting energy from the source (acoustic) signal. In this article, we survey some Multi-Source Energy Harvesting (MSEH) techniques from terrestrial BackCom which can be adopted to enhance the sustainability of ABackCom. We also show and discuss a case study where multiple energy sources are harvested in the water body and how much the harvested energy could extend the operation A-BackCom. Further, we discuss some challenges of MSEH in A-BackCom. Results from our case study show that MSEH in A-Back-Com could extend the lifetime of an A-BackCom node by allowing anrecharging time as low as 5.7 ms, even without an acoustic carrier signal.