Towards Symmetric Cross-technology Communication among Heterogeneous IoT Devices

Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) technique enables direct interconnection among heterogeneous devices, which provides new technical routes for IoT’s heterogeneous interconnection. However, existing CTC methods have a great dependence on the capabilities of wireless devices. The inherent asymmetry of devices’ capabilities brings great challenges to CTC. In this paper, we focus on establishing symmetric CTC among the heterogeneous IoT devices. We propose a CTC based on multi-subframe aggregation to solve the serious payload adaptation inefficiency problem caused by asymmetric data rate. Then we design a CTC based on multi-channel disturbance that achieves reliable decoding at low SNR and extends the communication range from ZigBee to WiFi. To cope with the spectrum inefficiency problem caused by asymmetric bandwidth, we propose a CTC based on multi-signal combination to achieve parallel transmission among commodity BLE, ZigBee, and LoRa devices. The evaluation results show that our methods can achieve efficient and reliable CTC among heterogeneous IoT devices.