Patent ID: 7269097

Claim:
A method for recovering environmental data from an area, said method comprising the steps of: deploying a plurality of sensors within the area, each sensor pre-assigned a modulation frequency; deploying a reader; gathering the environmental data with at least one sensor of the plurality of sensors; converting the environmental data to a digital data packet; processing the digital data packet to form encoded data; storing the encoded data as a data frame; outputting a modulation sequence with the sensor; transmitting a transmit signal from the reader to the plurality of sensors; replicating the transmit signal at the reader; producing a reflected signal at each sensor in response to the transmit signal; assigning a modulation frequency to the reflected signal; receiving the reflected signal at the reader with the assigned modulation frequency from the plurality of the sensors; translating the received reflected signal with the replicated transmit signal; separating frequency components of the translated received reflected signal into upper and lower sidebands; minimizing a phase difference between the upper and lower-sidebands to improve signal to noise ratios; partitioning the upper and lower sidebands into unique data channels; processing the data channels; outputting the encoded data from the processed data channels; and decoding the encoded data to retrieve the digital data packet and the environmental data.