BlueBee: 10,000x Faster Cross-Technology Communication from Bluetooth to ZigBee

Cross-Technology Communication is an emerging research direction providing a promising solution to the coexistence problem of heterogeneous wireless technologies in the ISM bands. However, existing works use only the coarse-grained packet-level information for cross-technology modulation, suffering from a low throughput (e.g., 10bps). Our approach, called BlueBee, aims at achieving much higher CTC throughput thus extends CTC applications. We proposes a new direction by emulating legitimate ZigBee frames using a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio. Uniquely, BlueBee achieves dual-standard compliance (i.e., BLE and ZigBee) and transparency by selecting only the payload of Bluetooth frames, requiring neither hardware nor firmware changes at the BLE senders and ZigBee receivers. Our implementation on commodity device testbeds shows that BlueBee can achieve a more than 99% accuracy and a throughput 10,000x faster than the state-of-the-art CTC reported so far. Here we demonstrate using BlueBee on a smartphone to control several smart light bulbs attached with ZigBee radio.