Concurrent Cross-Technology Communication Among Heterogeneous IoT Devices

Abstract

The exponentially increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the data generated by these devices introduces the spectrum crisis at the already crowded ISM 2.4-GHz band. To address this issue and enable more flexible and concurrent communications among IoT devices, we propose $B^{2}W^{2}$ , a novel communication framework that enables $N$ -way concurrent communication among Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices. Specifically, we demonstrate that it is possible to enable the BLE to Wi-Fi cross-technology communication while supporting the concurrent BLE to BLE and Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi communications. We conducted extensive experiments under different real-world settings, and results show that its throughput is more than 85 $\times$ times higher than that of the most recently reported cross-technology communication system, which only supports one-way communication (i.e., broadcasting) at any specific time.