Cross-technology Communication Technique Research Articles

Simultaneous Data Dissemination Among WiFi and ZigBee Devices

Recent advances in Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) have opened a new door for cooperation among heterogeneous IoT devices to support ubiquitous applications, such as smart homes and smart offices. However, existing work mainly focuses on physical layer performance improvements. In this paper, we explore how to leverage the latest CTC techniques for network layer performance improvements. Specifically, we introduce Waves, which leverages WiFi to ZigBee CTC and WiFi access point’s adaptive transmit power control techniques for reliable and fast data dissemination in low-duty-cycle ZigBee networks. We extensively evaluate our design under various settings. Evaluation results show that Waves can provide reliable data dissemination and is 33.5 times faster than the state-of-the-art protocol in terms of dissemination time.

Time Synchronization Based on Cross-Technology Communication for IoT Networks

Time synchronization is a fundamental requirement for wireless communication systems to work properly. Most of the existing studies focus on time synchronization among homogeneous devices. This work investigates time synchronization with heterogeneous technologies (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee and Bluetooth) which is important for the rising Internet of Thing (IoT) scenarios where heterogeneous devices coexist. Recent advances in Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) break the wall between heterogeneous wireless devices. In this work, we propose a new time synchronization strategy based on the CTC technique and provide a technique called TimeBee, which takes the advantage of coordination from a WiFi device to assist ZigBee devices for time synchronization. An effective method is employed so that ZigBee nodes are coordinated for time synchronization based on the received timestamps from WiFi devices. The experimental results show that TimeBee achieves global time synchronization with low time errors.

Spoofing Attack Detection Using Machine Learning in Cross-Technology Communication

Cross-technology communication (CTC) technique can realize direct communication among heterogeneous wireless devices (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth in the 2.4 G ISM band) without gateway equipment for forwarding, which makes heterogeneous wireless communication more convenient and greatly reduces communication costs. However, compared with the traditional homogeneous network model, CTC technique also makes it easier to implement spoofing attacks in heterogeneous networks. WiFi devices with long communication distances and sufficient energy supply can directly launch spoofing attacks against ZigBee devices, which brings severe security concerns for heterogeneous wireless communications. In this paper, we focus on the CTC spoofing attack, especially spoofing attacks from WiFi to ZigBee and propose a machine learning-based method to detect spoofing attacks for heterogeneous wireless networks by using physical-layer information. First, we model the received signal strength (RSS) data of legitimate ZigBee devices to construct a one-class support vector machine (OSVM) classifier for detecting CTC spoofing attacks depending on the obtained training samples. Then, we simulated CTC spoofing attacks in a live testbed and evaluated the performance of our detection method. Results show that our approach is highly effective in spoofing detection. Even if the distance between the legitimate ZigBee device and WiFi attacker is near each other (i.e., less than 2 m) and does not require a large number of samples, the detection rate and precision of our method are both over 90%. Finally, we employ the OSVM classifier to obtain samples of spoofing attacks and then explore using SVM to further improve the performance of the classifier.

LEGO-Fi: Transmitter-Transparent CTC With Cross-Demapping

Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) is an emerging technique that enables direct communication across different wireless technologies. The state-of-the-art works in this area propose physical-level CTC, in which the transmitters emulate signals that follow the receiver's standard. Physical-level CTC means considerable processing complexity at the transmitter, which does not apply to the communication from a low-end transmitter to a high-end receiver. This article proposes LEGO-Fi, which supports the CTC from ZigBee to WiFi and Bluetooth to WiFi. LEGO-Fi is a transmitter-transparent CTC technique, which leaves the processing complexity solely at the receiver side and therefore, makes a critical advance toward bidirectional high-throughput CTC. The key technique inside is cross-demapping, which stems from two key technical insights: 1) a ZigBee/Bluetooth packet leaves distinguishable features when passing the WiFi modules and 2) compared to ZigBee's/Bluetooth's simple encoding and modulation schemes, the rich processing capacity of WiFi offers extra flexibility to process a ZigBee/Bluetooth packet. The evaluation results show that LEGO-Fi achieves a throughput of 213.6 Kb/s in practice, which is, respectively, 13000×, 1200×, and 7.5× faster than FreeBee, ZigFi, and SymBee, the three existing ZigBee-to-WiFi CTC approaches. For the CTC from Bluetooth to WiFi, LEGO-Fi achieves a throughput of 904.1 Kb/s.

Neighbor Discovery Based on Cross-Technology Communication for Mobile Applications

Neighbor discovery is essential for mobile devices to find each other before communications. Traditional discovery protocols are constrained by the in-technology communication paradigm. Cross-Technology Communications enable ZigBee nodes to be coordinated by a WiFi node without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds the light on more efficient neighbor discovery schemes. In this work, we introduce a new direction for neighbor discovery based on Cross-Technology Communication technique and propose a physical-layer technique called NewBee. NewBee takes the advantages of coordinations from a WiFi node to assist ZigBee nodes for neighbor discovery. A simple yet effective Countdown Mechanism is employed so that ZigBee nodes are coordinately waked up according to the beacons in the Countdown Mechanism. We give a rigorous analysis on NewBee and the worst-case discovery latency is significantly reduced from the traditional $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ , where $n$ indicates the reciprocal of node's duty-cycle. The experimental results show that NewBee only needs 11%, 10%, 2.5%, 2.4% and 4.4% percent of discovery time compared with the state-of-the-art BlindDate, SearchLight, Disco, Quorum, and Birthday protocols with 5% nodes’ duty-cycle, respectively.

CDA: Coordinating data dissemination and aggregation in heterogeneous IoT networks using CTC

This paper presents a CDA mechanism to simultaneously coordinate data dissemination and data aggregation services in coexisting heterogeneous IoT networks (i.e., WiFi and ZigBee) using a WiFi Access Point (AP). With CDA, the WiFi signal interference to the low power ZigBee network is mitigated via the latest Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) techniques. The CTC techniques used in CDA are compatible with existing commodity IoT devices, which requires no hardware modification when implementing CDA. Specifically, the individual network status (e.g., duty cycle information) is first exchanged between different networks via CTC. Accordingly, the AP dynamically schedules its channel occupation time based on the communication demand and network status of both networks. Furthermore, a theoretical guidance is provided for the duty cycle control of the ZigBee network in coexisting scenarios, which guarantees the aggregation performance and extends the network's life-time. The proposed CDA mechanism is evaluated through a real-world testbed consisting of 2 WiFi devices and 40 ZigBee nodes. Experimental results show that CDA not only optimizes the ZigBee network's delay and life-time by 3.72 × and 1.24 × , respectively, but also improves the WiFi throughput by 1.94 × .

WiZig: Cross-Technology Energy Communication Over a Noisy Channel

The proliferation of IoT applications brings the demand of ubiquitous connections among heterogeneous wireless devices. Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) is a significant technique to directly exchange data among heterogeneous devices that follow different standards. By exploiting a side-channel like frequency, amplitude, or temporal modulation, the existing works enable CTC but have limited performance under channel noise. In this article, we propose WiZig, a novel CTC technique from WiFi to ZigBee that employs modulations in both the amplitude and temporal dimensions to optimize the throughput over a noisy channel. We establish a theoretical model of the energy communication channel to clearly understand the channel capacity. We then devise an online rate adaptation algorithm to adjust the modulation strategy according to the channel condition. Based on the theoretical model, WiZig controls the number of encoded energy amplitudes and the length of a receiving window, so as to optimize the CTC throughput. We implement a prototype of WiZig on a software radio platform and a commercial ZigBee device. The evaluation shows that WiZig achieves a throughput of 153.85bps with less than 1% symbol error rate in a real environment.

CDD: Coordinating Data Dissemination in Heterogeneous IoT Networks

Data dissemination in Internet of Things (IoT) networks provides a fundamental service for many critical applications. However, traditional dissemination schemes were investigated for an isolated IoT network, and did not fit the coexistence scenario of heterogeneous IoT networks. Motivated by the latest innovations in cross-technology communication (CTC) techniques, this article proposes CDD, a framework utilizing a WiFi-based access point (AP) to simultaneously conduct fast data diffusion in heterogeneous IoT networks (e.g., WiFi and ZigBee). We shed light on the network features in the coexistence scenario and then review the key challenges of coordinating dissemination based on CTC techniques. With these network features and challenges in mind, the CDD framework includes a series of designs to conduct efficient data dissemination in heterogeneous networks using a WiFi AP. The framework is implemented and evaluated on a real-world testbed. The results demonstrate that CDD can reduce the dissemination delay and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.

Survey of cross‐technology communication for IoT heterogeneous devices

The ever-developing Internet of Things (IoT) drives the prosperity of ubiquitous connections among heterogeneous wireless devices (e.g. WiFi, ZigBee and Bluetooth) that follow different standards. Wireless devices share unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical bands, offering an opportunity for cross-technology communication (CTC), where coexistence and cooperation mechanisms of wireless technologies incur the problem of coexistence. This study is purposed to present a rounded state-of-the-art survey on CTC from the hardware perspective, CTC techniques are roughly divided into two types: hardware based and hardware free. In hardware-based strategies, a dedicated hardware is required to send information to wireless devices for enabling direct communication. The hardware-free schemes, by contrast, enable heterogeneous wireless devices to communicate directly by exchanging information or data without the dedicated hardware. Recent advances in CTC are reviewed in both types by expatiating on how heterogeneous wireless devices are achieving direct communication. The authors compare some CTCs with respect to throughput, communication range, energy efficiency and cost, in addition, they present open research issues of two types.

RowBee: A Routing Protocol Based on Cross-Technology Communication for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Low and dynamic duty cycles cause that the E2E delay for packet delivery is more critical in energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs). The traditional routing protocols are constrained by the in-technology communication paradigm, where Wi-Fi devices can talk to the Wi-Fi devices only, and so on for ZigBee or wireless technology. This is, however, not necessary by recent advances in cross-technology communication (CTC). The CTC enables ZigBee nodes to be coordinated by a Wi-Fi node without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds the light on more efficient routing protocols design. In this paper, we introduce a new routing protocol based on a CTC technique called RowBee. RowBee takes the advantages of coordination from the Wi-Fi node to assist the ZigBee nodes for establishing routing paths and allows nodes to choose their duty cycles freely with finer duty-cycle granularity. A simple yet effective method is employed so that the ZigBee nodes are coordinately waked up simultaneously according to the beacons broadcasted by the Wi-Fi nodes. We implement RowBee based on a USRP-N210 and MICAz hybrid platform, and the experimental results show that RowBee can reduce the E2E delay greatly.