Cross-Technology Communication for Heterogeneous Wireless Devices Through Symbol-Level Energy Modulation

Abstract

The coexistence of heterogeneous devices in wireless networks brings a new topic on cross-technology communication (CTC) to improve the coexistence efficiency and boost collaboration among these devices. Current advances on CTC mainly fall into two categories, physical-layer CTC and packet-level energy modulation (PLEM). The physical-layer CTC achieves a high CTC data rate, but with channel incompatible to commercial devices, making it hard to be deployed in current wireless networks. PLEM is channel and physical layer compatible, but with two main drawbacks of the low CTC data rate and MAC incompatibility, which will induce severe interference to the other devices' normal data transmissions. In this paper, we propose symbol-level energy modulation (SLEM), the first CTC method that is fully compatible with current devices in both channel and the physical/MAC layer processes, having the ability to be deployed in commercial wireless networks smoothly. SLEM inserts extra bits to WiFi data bits to generate the transmitting bits, so as to adjust the energy levels of WiFi symbols to deliver CTC information. We make theoretical analysis to figure out the performance of both CTC and WiFi transmissions. We also conduct experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of SLEM and its performance under different network situations.

Enabling Cross-Technology Coexistence for ZigBee Devices Through Payload Encoding

“…Actually, the idea of using payload encoding to change the transmitting signal starts from WEBee [5], which makes a WiFi device transmit an emulated ZigBee signal through payload encoding, thus to achieve WiFi to ZigBee cross-technology communication (CTC). After that, we see some other papers use the similar idea to achieve CTC in other contexts [6]- [9]. This paper is the first to use payload encoding to improve the coexistence network performance.…”

Real-Time Investigation of Cross-Technology Interference in Heterogeneous IoT Networks

“…To meet the challenges of low-power wireless networks, several standardization bodies have tried to develop lowpower wireless technology standards. These standards offer multiple features and protocols to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of different IoT applications [12,13]. However, the practical use of these standards has indicated several limitations.…”

“…These limitations highlight the need for further analysis to seek practical solutions that can meet the existing and future requirements of IoT applications. Major IoT connectivity solutions [14] and their relative comparison have been shown in Table 1.…”

Internet of medical things: Prospects, challenges and future research directions

“…Using these cellular technologies, high levels of performance and security can be attained. For instance, fast response times, high data rates up to 10 Gbps with low latency, high flexibility, high scalability, connectivity to heterogeneous devices, a wide range of supported applications as well as enhanced QoS are some of the goals pursued by these technologies [107]- [109]. However, attacks such as de-synchronization still presents some challenges in these networks.…”