Cross Technology Communication through Symbol Level Energy Modulation for Commercial Wireless Networks
The coexistence of heterogeneous devices in wireless networks brings a new topic on cross technology communication (CTC) to improve the coexistence efficiency and boost collaboration among these devices. Current advances on CTC mainly fall into two categories, physical layer CTC and packet level energy modulation (PLEM) The physical layer CTC achieves a high CTC data rate, but with channel incompatible to commercial devices, making it hard to be deployed in current wireless networks. PLEM is channel and physical layer compatible, but with two main drawbacks of the low CTC data rate and MAC incompatibility, which will induce severe interference to the other devices' normal data transmissions. In this paper, we propose symbol level energy modulation (SLEM) the first CTC method that is fully compatible with current devices in both channel and the physical/MAC layer processes, having the ability to be deployed in commercial wireless networks smoothly. SLEM attaches the CTC bits to one WiFi data packet through adjusting the energy levels of WiFi symbols, achieving concurrent CTC and WiFi transmissions. We make theoretical analysis to figure out the performance tradeoff between CTC and WiFi, and also conduct experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of SLEM and its performance under different network situations.
2020 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom)