Enabling Global Cooperation for Heterogeneous Networks via Reliable Concurrent Cross Technology Communications

Industrial scientific medical (ISM) band has become more and more crowded due to the ever-growing size of many mainstream technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Bluetooth. Though the coexistence issue has led to severe Cross Technology Interference (CTI), it provides great opportunities to better utilize the scarce bandwidth resources. A fundamental question is how to ensure harmonious and effective operations for different networks? To exploit it, a novel global cooperation framework is proposed. In particular, our work enables reliable concurrent Cross Technology Communication (CTC) from Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Bluetooth commodity devices. Compared to existing CTC approaches, our scheme improves the communication efficiency significantly, and hence is the foundation for effective global cooperation. Based on the proposed CTC scheme, a unified Media Access Control (MAC) approach is introduced to cooperate CTC message transmission and reception for heterogeneous networks with different MACs. Three proof-of-concepts applications, e.g., global synchronization, global CTI coordination and global Location Based Service (LBS) broadcasting are discussed to fully leverage the benefits of global cooperation. Extensive evaluations show that compared with existing schemes, the proposed framework achieves 8.1 times lower synchronization error, 9 times lower packet delivery delay, and 2.7 times lower energy consumption for acquiring LBS message.