ZiFi: a lightweight Cross-Technology Communication via RSS Encoding

Cross-Technology Communication opens a new direction to solve the coexistence and collaboration among heterogeneous wireless devices in ISM band. At present, many CTC technologies have been proposed. However, there are few high throughput CTC works from ZigBee to WiFi. Our approach, called ZiFi, is a novel CTC framework that lightweight enough to convey data from ZigBee to WiFi. The key idea of ZiFi is to modulate symbol message by leveraging change of the ZigBee packets power. At the receiver side, WiFi device senses RSS value and recognizes ZigBee signal energy pattern to decode transmitted symbols. We finally implement and evaluate ZiFi on commodity WiFi and ZigBee devices. Our results show that it is feasible to use RSS of ZigBee packets and ZiFi can achieve a throughput rate of 297.1bps (the latest packet-level CTC method is 215.9bps). Here we demonstrate using ZiFi on a laptop to receive temperature data from a ZigBee node.