ECT: Exploiting Cross-Technology Concurrent Transmission for Reducing Packet Delivery Delay in IoT Networks

Recent advances in cross-technology communication have significantly improved the spectrum efficiency in the same ISM band among heterogeneous wireless devices (e.g., WiFi and ZigBee). However, further performance improvement in the whole network is hampered because the cross-technology network layer is missing. As the first cross-technology network layer design, our work, named ECT, opens a promising direction for significantly reducing the packet delivery delay via collaborative and concurrent cross-technology communication between WiFi and ZigBee devices. Specifically, ECT can dynamically change the nodes' priorities and reduce the delivery delay from high priority nodes under unreliable links. The key idea of ECT is to leverage the concurrent transmission of important data and raw data from ZigBee nodes to the WiFi AP. We extensively evaluate ECT under different network settings and results show that our ECT's packet delivery delay is more than 29 times lower than the current state-of-the-art solution.