The key technologies of cross-technology communication

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a variety of wireless communication technologies have come up to meet the requirements of different applications in communication range, energy consumption, delay, and others. Because of the heterogeneity and communication barriers of different wireless communication technologies, heterogeneous devices can not communicate directly with each other. Due to the lack of information interaction, widely deployed heterogeneous IoT devices suffer from severe interference and the competition of spectrum resources. Moreover, the communication barriers between heterogeneous devices also limit information sharing and resource integration, and it needs extra overhead using the gateway to realize the communication between heterogeneous devices. Therefore, the research on cross-technology communication is put forward. It does not need gateways as the intermediate device for protocol conversion, which provides direct communication and satisfies the requirement of communication between heterogeneous devices. This paper first systematically analyzes and surveys the research status of cross-technology communication. On this basis, the key technologies of cross-technology communication are proposed, including packet level, signal level, and symbol level. Then, the proposed technologies are demonstrated for the anti-interference coordination application in the field of the co-existence of heterogeneous IoT devices. Finally, the prospects for cross-technology communication are discussed and concluded.