I2C: Joint Intra-Packet and Inter-Packet Coding for Reliable Cross-Technology Communication

Recent advances on physical-layer cross-technology communication (PHY-CTC) enable high-throughput direct communication between heterogeneous wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth) via signal emulation. This technique opens a new way for efficient coordination and cooperation among heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the same ISM band. However, the state of the arts in PHY-CTC can hardly ensure data transmission reliability due to emulation errors. To solve this problem, we present I
²
C, a joint coding scheme with intra-packet coding and inter-packet coding for reliable data transmission in PHY-CTC. In our design, the intra-packet coding is adopted to rectify intrinsic errors introduced by PHY-CTC signal emulation, while the inter-packet coding is leveraged to further recover original data despite packet loss, and PHY-CTC feedbacks are employed to ensure data integrity. We implement I
²
C on USRP N210 with 802.11g PHY as WiFi sender and Tmote Sky as ZigBee receiver. Evaluation results show that I
²
C achieves 99.7% reliability with higher throughput than other schemes.