Demo: Activating Wireless Voice for E-Toll Collection Systems with Zero Start-up Cost

This work enhances the machine-to-human communication between electronic toll collection (ETC) systems and drivers by providing an AM broadcast service to deployed ETC systems. This demo is the first to show that ultra-high radio frequency identification signals can be received by an AM radio receiver due to the presence of the nonlinearity effect in the AM receiver. Such a phenomenon allows the development of a previously infeasible cross-technology communication, called Tagcaster, which converts an ETC reader to an AM station for broadcasting short messages (e.g., charged-fees and trafic forecast) to drivers at tollbooths. The prototype of Tagcaster is designed, implemented and evaluated over four general and five vehicle-mounted AM receivers (e.g., Toyota, Audi, and Jetta). Experiments reveal that Tagcaster can provide good-quality (PESQ>2) and stable AM broadcasting service with a 30 m coverage range.