Chiron

Abstract

The exponentially increasing number of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices motivate us to explore more efficient and higher throughput communication, especially at the bottleneck (i.e., edge) of the IoT networks. Our work, named Chiron, opens a promising direction for Physical (PHY) layer concurrent high throughput communication to heterogeneous IoT devices (e.g., wider-band WiFi and narrower-band ZigBee). Specifically, at the PHY layer, Chiron enables concurrently transmitting (or receiving) 1 stream of WiFi data and up to 4 streams of ZigBee data to (or from) commodity WiFi and ZigBee devices as if there is no interference between these simultaneous connections. We extensively evaluate our system under different real-world settings. Results show that Chiron's concurrent WiFi and ZigBee communication can achieve similar throughput as the sole WiFi or ZigBee communication. Chiron's spectrum utilization is more than 16 times better than the traditional gateway.