Transparent cross-technology communication over data traffic

Cross-technology communication (CTC) techniques are introduced in recent literatures to explore the opportunities of collaboration between heterogeneous wireless technologies, such as WiFi and ZigBee. Their applications include context-aware services and global channel coordination. However, state-of-the-art CTC schemes either suffer from channel inefficiency, low throughput, or disruption to existing networks. This paper presents the CTC via data packets (DCTC), which takes advantage of abundant existing data packets to construct recognizable energy patterns. DCTC features (i) a significant enhancement in CTC throughput while (ii) keeping transparent to upper layer protocols and applications. Our design also features advanced functions including multiplexing to support concurrent transmissions of multiple DCTC senders and adaptive rate control according to the traffic volume. Testbed implementations across WiFi and ZigBee platforms demonstrate reliable bidirectional communication of over 95% in accuracy while achieving throughput 2.3x of the state of the art. Meanwhile, experiment results show that DCTC has little and bounded impact on the delay and throughput of original data traffic.