I2C: Joint Intra-Packet and Inter-Packet Coding for Reliable Cross-Technology Communication

Abstract

Recent advances on physical-layer cross-technology communication (PHY-CTC) enable high-throughput direct communication between heterogeneous wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth) via signal emulation. This technique opens a new way for efficient coordination and cooperation among heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the same ISM band. However, the state of the arts in PHY-CTC can hardly ensure data transmission reliability due to emulation errors. To solve this problem, we present I2C, a joint coding scheme with intra-packet coding and inter-packet coding for reliable data transmission in PHY-CTC. In our design, the intra-packet coding is adopted to rectify intrinsic errors introduced by PHY-CTC signal emulation, while the inter-packet coding is leveraged to further recover original data despite packet loss, and PHY-CTC feedbacks are employed to ensure data integrity. We implement I2C on USRP N210 with 802.11g PHY as WiFi sender and Tmote Sky as ZigBee receiver. Evaluation results show that I2C achieves 99.7% reliability with higher throughput than other schemes.