C-Morse: Cross-technology communication with transparent Morse coding

• Published in: IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Zhimeng Yin, Wenchao Jiang, Song Min Kim, Tian He
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2017
• Subjects: Delays; Throughput; Wireless communication; Wireless fidelity; Wireless sensor networks; ZigBee
• DOI: 10.1109/INFOCOM.2017.8057107

Recent research on CTC (cross-technology communication) demonstrates the viability of direct coordination among heterogeneous devices (e.g., WiFi and ZigBee) with incompatible physical layers. Although encouraging, current solutions suffer from either severe inefficiency in channel utilization or low throughput using limited beacons. To address these limitations, this paper presents C-Morse, which leverages all traffic (such as through data packets, beacons and other control frames) to achieve a high cross-technology communication throughput. The key idea of C-Morse is to slightly perturb the transmission timing of existing WiFi packets to construct recognizable radio energy patterns without introducing noticeable delays to upper layers. At the receiver side, ZigBee captures such patterns by sensing the RSSI value, and then decodes the transmitted symbols. C-Morse also introduces a novel timing-based multiplexing technique to allow the coexistence of multiple C-Morse access points and reject other interference, showing a reliable symbol delivery ratio. As a result, C-Morse achieves a free side-channel, whose CTC throughput is as much as 9 χ of the present state of the art, while maintaining the through traffic within a negligible delay that goes unnoticed by applications and end-users.