Leveraging Cross-Technology Broadcast Communication to build Gateway-Free Smart Homes

Despite the growing interest in cross-technology communication, its application to real-world systems is still limited, as existing schemes are mostly unidirectional and technology-specific. The lack of generic solutions as well as the complexity of their integration reduces the applicability in a broader scope. In this paper, we propose a solution to augment Wi-Fi, BLE, and ZigBee devices with the ability to transmit and receive cross-technology broadcast frames alongside their existing functionality. After experimentally evaluating the performance of our solution on a variety of hardware platforms, we leverage it to build a gateway-free smart home, where a smartphone can simultaneously control heterogeneous smart objects. The smart objects, which include an off-the-shelf ZigBee light bulb and a BLE-enabled door lock from different vendors, perform cross-technology communication while retaining their original functionality and can maintain duty-cycled operations.