WiZig: Cross-technology energy communication over a noisy channel

Abstract

The proliferation of loT applications drives the need of ubiquitous connections among heterogeneous wireless devices. Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) is a significant technique to directly exchange information 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 paper, we propose WiZig, a novel CTC technique that employs modulation techniques 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 can accurately control 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 show that WiZig achieves a throughput of 153.85 bps with less than 1 % symbol error rate in a real environment. The results demonstrate that WiZig realizes efficient and reliable CTC under varied channel conditions.