  We demonstrate the world's first hybrid radio platform which combines the
strengths of active radio (long range and robustness to interference) and
Computational RFIDs (low power consumption). We evaluate the Wireless
Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), an EPC C1G2 standard-based,
Computational RFID backscatter radio, against Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and
show (theoretically and experimentally) that WISP in high channel attenuation
conditions is less energy efficient per received byte than BLE. Exploiting this
observation we design a simple switching mechanisms that backs off to BLE when
radio conditions for WISP are unfavorable. By a set of laboratory experiments,
we show that our proposed hybrid active/backscatter radio obtains higher
goodput than WISP and lower energy consumption than BLE as stand-alone
platforms, especially when WISP is in range of an RFID interrogator for the
majority of the time. Simultaneously, our proposed platform is as energy
efficient as BLE when user is mostly out of RFID interrogator range.
