[Abstract]

Massive connectivity is key to the success of the Internet of Things. In this talk, I will introduce the technology of mmWave backscatter that has the potential to scale to millions of connections. Specifically, I will discuss our latest work that overcomes the substantial signal attenuation and overwhelming ambient reflections to bring mmWave backscatter to practice. The technique offers an extreme sensitivity of -115 dBm, boosts the SNR by over five orders of magnitude, and scales up to millions of concurrent connections without coordination — paving a pathway towards the vision of massive IoT and hyperconnectivity. Beyond communication, I will briefly talk about localization via mmWave backscatter, where I will demonstrate the fine-grained sub-centimeter positioning (6.7mm median accuracy) ranges up to 160m, tracks mobile objects, and simultaneously localizes 100 devices in only 732ms.

[Biography]

Song Min Kim is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST, Korea. Previously, he was with the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, USA. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and M.E./B.E. degrees from Korea University. His research spans wireless networking, communication, and system building, with an emphasis on backscatter, mobile, and the Internet of Things. He currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has received the best paper awards in ACM MobiSys 2022 and IEEE ICDCS 2018.