Networking Support For Physical-Layer Cross-Technology Communication

Recent research on physical layer cross technology communication (PHY-CTC) brings a timely answer for escalated wireless coexistence and open spectrum movement. PHY-CTC achieves direct communication among heterogeneous wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee) in physical layer and thus brings communication support for coexistence service such as spectrum management and IoT device control. To put PHY-CTC into service, however, there still exists a gap due to its transmission failure and asymmetric link (i.e., one-way PHYCTC) issues. In this paper, we propose NetCTC - the first networking support design for PHY-CTC to establish feedbacks (e.g., ACKs) and thus meet the upper layer networking requirements in heterogeneous unicast, multicast and broadcast. The core design of NetCTC is a real-time interaction mechanism which achieves reliable, transmission efficient and parallel interactive communication among heterogeneous devices. We implement and evaluate NetCTC on commodity devices (Laptops with Atheros AR2425 WiFi NIC, smart phones with Broadcom BCM4330 WiFi chip and MicaZ CC2420) and the USRP-N210 platform. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates that NetCTC achieves reliable bidirectional cross technology communication under a full range of wireless configurations including stationary, mobile and dutycycled settings.