CTC-CEM: Low-Latency Cross-Technology Channel Establishment with Multiple Nodes

Abstract

Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) allows direct message exchange between devices with different (i.e., incompatible) wireless communication standards. CTC is particularly suitable to allow for coordination between heterogeneous devices sharing the same spectrum, as in the Internet of Things. Existing research on CTC has focused on enabling communications for diverse technologies with the goal of achieving a high throughput. However, it did not address how to establish a link suitable for CTC, which is necessary for successful data exchange. This article specifically addresses such a problem by introducing CTC-CEM (CTC Channel Establishment with Multiple nodes), a scheme to establish a CTC channel involving the use of multiple nodes in a network. CTC-CEM employs duty-cycling and leverages network density to reduce energy consumption, while keeping a low discovery latency. In particular, CTC-CEM defines different discovery protocols to reliably detect co-located networks. Moreover, it addresses the selection of multiple CTC nodes as a set cover problem, and includes an optimization technique based on dynamic programming to balance the energy consumption in the whole network. Extensive simulations show that CTC-CEM effectively distributes the energy consumption in the network, increasing fairness by 97% after optimization. Furthermore, the latency in establishing a channel with CTC-CEM is two orders of magnitude lower than that for device discovery in duty-cycled networks.