Long-Range Backscatter Connectivity via Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar

SARComm is a novel wireless communication system that enables passive satellite backscatter connectivity using existing spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals. We demonstrate that SAR signals from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite, used to image Earth's terrain, can be leveraged to enable low-power ground-to-satellite communication. This paper presents the first cooperative, on-the-ground target that modulates SAR backscatter to send information bits and analyzes how to extract them from publicly available Sentinel-1 datasets. To demonstrate the system, we evaluate the effectiveness of modulating the radar cross section of corner reflectors both mechanically and electronically to encode data bits, develop a deployment algorithm to optimize corner reflector placement, and present a SAR processing pipeline to enable communication.