WindScatter: An Ultra-Low-Power, Long-Range, Large-Scale Wind Speed Monitoring System

Wind speed monitoring is crucial for environmental management and forecasting. However, current solutions often struggle with high power consumption, especially at the end device, which typically has a sensor and wireless radios with limited battery capacity. To this end, we present WindScatter, an ultra-low-power, long-range, and large-scale wind speed monitoring system. WindScatter adopts the Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) paradigm to enable low-power operation. It reuses the sensed data for communication by leveraging a TMR (Tunnel Magneto-Resistance) switch sensor to measure the wind speed information and control the backscatter communication simultaneously, thus avoiding the need for analog-to-digital conversion and a microcontroller for communication control. Our hardware-software co-design enables accurate measurements and stable concurrent transmission. We implement WindScatter and conduct extensive experiments and case studies to evaluate its performance. Results show that WindScatter supports measurements of all wind speed levels on the Extended Beaufort scale, from 1.5 m/s to 60 m/s, with an average error rate of 0.78%. WindScatter can sense and transmit wind speed data at a distance of 800 m with a power consumption of 136.5$\mu$W. Compared with commodity devices, WindScatter achieves comparable measurement range and accuracy while reducing cost by$91.5\times$and power consumption by$8,791\times$.