Mighty: Towards Long-Range and High-Throughput Backscatter for Drones

While small drone video streaming systems create unprecedented video content, they also place a power burden exceeding 20% on the drone's battery, limiting flight endurance. We present Mighty, a hardware-software solution to minimize the power consumption of a drone's video streaming system by offloading power overheads associated with both video compression and transmission to a ground controller. Mighty innovates a high performance co-design among: (1) a ring oscillator-based, ultra-low power backscatter radio; (2) a spectrally-efficient, non-linear, low-power physical layer modulation and multi-chain radio architecture; and (3) a lightweight video compression codec-bypassing software design. Our co-design exploits synergies among these components, resulting in joint throughput and range performance that pushes the known envelope. We prototype Mighty on PCB board and conduct extensive field studies both indoors and outdoors. The power efficiency of Mighty is about 16.6 nJ/bit. A head-to-head comparison with a DJI Mini2 drone's default video streaming system shows that Mighty achieves similar throughput at a drone-to-controller distance of up to 150 meters, with 34-55x improvement of power efficiency than WiFi-based video streaming solutions.