Boosting the Bitrate of Cross-Technology Communication on Commodity IoT Devices

Abstract

The cross-technology communication (CTC) is a promising technique proposed recently to bridge heterogeneous wireless technologies in the ISM bands. Existing solutions use only the coarse-grained packet-level information for CTC modulation, suffering from a low throughput (e.g., 10 b/s). Our approach, called BlueBee, explores the dense PHY-layer information for CTC by emulating legitimate ZigBee frames with the Bluetooth radio. Uniquely, BlueBee achieves dual-standard compliance and transparency for its only modifying the payload of Bluetooth frames, requiring neither hardware nor firmware changes at either the Bluetooth sender or the ZigBee receiver. Our implementation on both USRP and commodity devices shows that BlueBee can achieve standard ZigBee bit rate of 250 kb/s at more than 99% accuracy, which is over 10 000x faster than the state-of-the-art packet-level CTC technologies.