Maximum network throughput based on cross-technology communication for sensor networks

Abstract

The exponentially increasing number of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices (e.g., WiFi and ZigBee) crowed in the same ISM band (2.4G) and recent advances in Cross-Technology Communications (CTC) motivate us to explore more efficient data collection and maximize network throughput. CTC enables WiFi and ZigBee devices to communicate directly without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds light on a more efficient data collection design. In this work, we propose a distributed algorithm, named MaxBee, to compute the maximum network throughput, which is formulated as a linear programming problem. Considering that the problem turns out to be non-convex and hard to solve exactly, we propose a distributed algorithm to solve nonlinear programming by using the dual decomposition method and gradient/subgradient algorithms. Through extensive simulations on different sets of deployed ZigBee and WiFi devices, we observe that the proposed algorithm significantly increases the network throughput based on CTC for Sensor Networks.