Summarization: Due to its ultra-low-power and low-complexity character, backscatter radio technology has been recently employed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This work puts forth experimental study on drone (UAV)-based interrogation of a backscatter environmental WSN; the latter can measure various environmental attributes (e.g., soil moisture), assisting the farmers towards more productive and greener operation. Three backscatter radio architectures are experimentally compared: a) monostatic, where a single embedded software-defined radio (SDR) is used for illuminating the sensors, receiving and decoding the sensor-backscattered signal, b) bistatic illumination from a drone and c) bistatic illumination from a pedestrian; in the latter two architectures, a remote SDR received and processed the sensor-backscattered signals. For the specific small-scale sensor deployment, it was surprisingly found that the bistatic pedestrian illumination was roughly twice as effective compared to the bistatic drone illumination, which was again twice as effective compared to the mono static drone illumination. Safety issues relevant to low-altitude flights in the monostatic architecture were also raised. Future work will focus on larger-scale backscatter sensor deployments. Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 2021 6th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies
