High-Throughput Cross-Technology Communication via Chip-Level Side Channel

Abstract

Cross-technology Communication (CTC) is a novel technique enabling data transmission among devices equipped with different physical layers in a heterogeneous wireless network. Particularly, by enabling cross-technology communication between ZigBee and WiFi, the energy-saving problem and media access control under cross-technology interference would be resolved easily. However, the current CTC designs are either too slow or destructive to ongoing ZigBee transmissions. In this paper, we propose a new Cross-technology Communication framework based on ZigBee chip-level side channel. The proposed design enables the high-throughput ZigBee-to-WiFi cross-technology communication while maintaining transparency to the existing ZigBee network. Specifically, we modify some ZigBee chips within one ZigBee symbol to create a side channel at the CTC sender (ZigBee) for carrying CTC bits while the CTC receiver (WiFi) can detect those modifications and demodulate the CTC bits at WiFi preamble detection. Both theoretical analysis and experiments show that our design would be transparent to ZigBee and throughput can reach 31.25 Kbps—1000× the state-of-the-art CTC design.