Recent years have seen major innovations in developing energy-efficient wireless technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for Internet of Things (IoT). Despite demonstrating significant benefits in providing low power transmission and massive connectivity, hardly any of these technologies have made it to directly connect to the Internet. Recent advances demonstrate the viability of direct communication among heterogeneous IoT devices with incompatible physical (PHY) layers. These techniques, however, require modifications in transmission power or time, which may affect the media access control (MAC) layer behaviors in legacy networks. In this paper, we argue that the frequency domain can serve as a free side channel with minimal interruptions to legacy networks. To this end, we propose DopplerFi, a communication framework that enables a two-way communication channel between BLE and Wi-Fi by injecting artificial Doppler shifts, which can be decoded by sensing the patterns in the Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) demodulator and Channel State Information (CSI). The artificial Doppler shifts can be compensated by the inherent frequency synchronization module and thus have a negligible impact on legacy communications. Our evaluation using commercial offthe-shelf (COTS) BLE chips and 802.11-compliant testbeds have demonstrated that DopplerFi can achieve throughput up to 6.5 Kbps at the cost of merely less than 0.8% throughput loss.

Nowadays unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being widely applied to a wealth of civil and military applications. Robust and high-throughput wireless communication is the crux of these UAV applications. Yet, air-to-ground links suffer from time-varying channels induced by the agile mobility and dynamic environments. Rate adaptation algorithms are generally used to choose the optimal data rate based on the current channel conditions. State-of-the-art approaches leverage physical layer information for rate adaptation, and they work well under certain conditions. However, the above protocols still have limitation under constantly changing flight states and environments for airto-ground links. To solve this problem, we propose StateRate, a state-optimized rate adaptation algorithm that fully exploits the characteristics of UAV systems using a hybrid deep learning model. The key observation is that the rate adaptation strategy needs to be adjusted according to motion-dependent channel models, which can be reflected by flight states. In this work, the rate adaptation protocol is enhanced with the help of the on-board sensors in UAVs. To make full use of the sensor data, we introduce a learning-based prediction module by leveraging the internal state to dynamically store temporal features under variable flight states. We also present an online learning algorithm by employing the pre-trained model that adapts the rate adaptation algorithm to different environments. We implement our algorithm on a commercial UAV platform and evaluate it in various environments. The results demonstrate that our system outperforms the best-known rate adaptation algorithm up to 53% in terms of throughput when the velocity is 2-6 m/s.

The conventional high-speed Wi-Fi has recently become a contender for low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications. OFDM continues its adoption in the new IoT Wi-Fi standard due to its spectrum efficiency that can support the demand of massive IoT connectivity. While the IoT Wi-Fi standard offers many new features to improve power and spectrum efficiency, the basic physical layer (PHY) structure of transceiver design still conforms to its conventional design rationale where access points (AP) and clients employ the same OFDM PHY. In this paper, we argue that current Wi-Fi PHY design does not take full advantage of the inherent asymmetry between AP and IoT. To fill the gap, we propose an asymmetric design where IoT devices transmit uplink packets using the lowest power while pushing all the decoding burdens to the AP side. Such a design utilizes the sufficient power and computational resources at AP to trade for the transmission (TX) power of IoT devices. The core technique enabling this asymmetric design is that the AP takes full power of its high clock rate to boost the decoding ability. We provide an implementation of our design and show that it can reduce up to 88% of the IoTs TX power when the AP sets 8× clock rate.

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The conventional high-speed Wi-Fi has recently become a contender for low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications. OFDM continues its adoption in the new IoT Wi-Fi standard due to its spectrum efficiency that can support the demand of massive IoT connectivity. While the IoT Wi-Fi standard offers many new features to improve power and spectrum efficiency, the basic physical layer (PHY) structure of transceiver design still conforms to its conventional design rationale where access points (AP) and clients employ the same OFDM PHY. In this paper, we argue that current Wi-Fi PHY design does not take full advantage of the inherent asymmetry between AP and IoT. To fill the gap, we propose an asymmetric design where IoT devices transmit uplink packets using the lowest power while pushing all the decoding burdens to the AP side. Such a design utilizes the sufficient power and computational resources at AP to trade for the transmission (TX) power of IoT devices. The core technique enabling this asymmetric design is that the AP takes full power of its high clock rate to boost the decoding ability. We provide an implementation of our design and show that it can reduce the IoT's TX power by boosting the decoding capability at the receivers.

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