Cross-Technology Communication for Heterogeneous Wireless Devices Through Symbol-Level Energy Modulation

The coexistence of heterogeneous devices in wireless networks brings a new topic on cross-technology communication (CTC) to improve the coexistence efficiency and boost collaboration among these devices. Current advances on CTC mainly fall into two categories, physical-layer CTC and packet-level energy modulation (PLEM). The physical-layer CTC achieves a high CTC data rate, but with channel incompatible to commercial devices, making it hard to be deployed in current wireless networks. PLEM is channel and physical layer compatible, but with two main drawbacks of the low CTC data rate and MAC incompatibility, which will induce severe interference to the other devices' normal data transmissions. In this paper, we propose symbol-level energy modulation (SLEM), the first CTC method that is fully compatible with current devices in both channel and the physical/MAC layer processes, having the ability to be deployed in commercial wireless networks smoothly. SLEM inserts extra bits to WiFi data bits to generate the transmitting bits, so as to adjust the energy levels of WiFi symbols to deliver CTC information. We make theoretical analysis to figure out the performance of both CTC and WiFi transmissions. We also conduct experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of SLEM and its performance under different network situations.