Cross-technology Communication and Sensing Using Low-power IoT

IoT has improved our lives through tremendous applications like Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) and wireless sensing, which are empowered by heterogeneous wireless technologies. The advantages of heterogenous IoT have created a cycle of positive reinforcements, which leads to the explosive expansion of the heterogeneous IoT ecosystem. As a result, approximately 7.74B devices, including 3B WiFi, 3B Bluetooth, and 130M ZigBee devices, along with other >20 IoT techniques, densely coexist on the shared wireless spectrum and the physical world to satisfy our diverse needs. This dissertation studies two major aspects of wireless IoT: communication and sensing. Due to the incompatibility of physical-layer designs, such dense coexistence usually results in strong wireless interference, poor connectivity, low spectrum efficiency, and unnecessary energy wastage. The first contribution of this dissertation is establishing ubiquitous connectivity among heterogeneous IoT, which allows WiFi and ZigBee devices to communicate with each other directly. Specifically, this dissertation presents SymBee to enable a low-end IoT (ZigBee) device to directly transmit to a high-end IoT (WiFi) device at the signal level, where the ZigBee signal is recognized and decoded at Wi-Fi. X-MIMO is also presented to allow a WiFi device to deliver different packets to multiple low-end IoT (ZigBee) devices simultaneously, which reuses the wireless spectrum efficiently. The second contribution is upgrading ubiquitous connectivity to ubiquitous networking for practical services. To initialize and maintain ubiquitous networking, this dissertation presents X-Disco to enable a commodity Wi-Fi device to obtain the heterogeneous (ZigBee) neighbor information, including neighbor address, individual ID, and network ID. X-Disco is a single-sided design on commodity WiFi devices to subtly obtain the ambient heterogeneous IoT neighbor (ZigBee) information while leaving the ZigBee network untouched. Besides WiFi and ZigBee, this dissertation also explores the ultra-wideband (UWB), a variant of 802.15.4 protocol (Physical layer of ZigBee), for improving sensing capability to detect car occupancy. The third contribution is presenting UMusic, a novel wireless sensing system that resolves commercial viability, privacy, and sensitivity simultaneously using the commodity UWB devices. This dissertation draws a picture of leveraging the PHY layer in wireless IoT to achieve better communication and sensing performance, which could be directly applied to wireless systems and networks at zero cost.

Author

• Wang, Shuai

• Cross-technology Communication
• Mobile Computing
• Physical Layer
• Wireless Communication
• Wireless Sensing

Identifier

hdl:1920/13713

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/13713